Poppyland (20 page)

All the dresses hanging up in this room were put here by Jean, though they once belonged to Bonnie, but it's not surprising that they look so uninhabited. Can that be the right word for a dress? It's certainly the right word for the room. A whiff of the dry, acrid smell of mothballs curls into the gentle muskiness in the air. Ryder shuts the wardrobe door again. As it swings shut he sees his mother's reflection in the mirror on the door. She hovers on the threshold of the room, the fingers of one hand clasped in the other, anxiety driving lines up her forehead and on through her hairline. Staring at her, Ryder notices the ripples in her hair carefully created by the local hairdresser. He reckons they are more a manifestation of his mother's state of mind than personal adornment.

‘Darling, there you are.' She has a way of speaking to Ryder that comes across as if she's from a parallel universe and very surprised to have bumped into him in this life at all. Her eyes meet his briefly, but she
doesn't come into the room or invite an embrace. Ryder feels a rush of sorrow. He has never thought of his mother as small before, and now she seems to hardly fill the doorway, and her expression is fearful.

‘Morning, Ma, I thought I'd find something of Bonnie's to give to Mac's daughter for her christening.' There is no point in beating about the bush, Ryder feels caught with his hands in the till, and frustrated enough to be direct; it is his mother who has created this set-up. Last night when he mentioned Mac's children's christening, his mother had said, ‘I just don't see how we can go,' in a voice of such practised martyrdom that he decided not to discuss any of it further.

Jean moves forward into the room, she puts a hand out, twisting the edge of the curtain, and glances again at Ryder, her eyes moving ceaselessly on around the room. ‘I just didn't know what to do with all her things. I thought when we moved they would somehow be dealt with, and they never have been.'

Ryder shuts his eyes, he doesn't want another anguished conversation. There have been too many over the years and they add up to nothing. No one goes anywhere except round and round in confusion.

‘I know,' he says, and waits for the next bit apprehensively. But suddenly he is opening his eyes in surprise, as Jean goes on, her voice level, not unhappy or strained, and even a tiny bit warm.

‘You know, Ryder, I haven't been stuck in the past as much as you might think. I've accepted that Bonnie's gone. A long time ago in fact.'

Ryder waits, Jean looks at him openly at last, and he sees that the distance in her eyes, a shifting unapproachable element that he has always known, has changed. She is still talking. ‘And yes, I think that's lovely – find whatever you think would be – would be – well, yes, take whatever you want for Mac's daughter. And it's time for me to go through this room properly.'

‘Don't do it on my account.' Ryder says the first thing that comes into his head. Jean sits on the bed next to him; she smells of china tea and lemons. He thinks of Leonard Cohen suddenly, and the lines where Suzanne feeds him tea and oranges. On a houseboat, come to think of it. He sighs and wonders why he has to be such a fucking idiot to throw back something so fragile, so long awaited as his mother's attempt at building a bridge between them.

But Jean squeezes his hand, her touch is soft and giving, not brittle as he expected. Then she takes both his hands. ‘I don't quite know how to say this to you, and I'm very ashamed I didn't say it before, as it's so important.' Her eyes swim, she bites her lip. ‘I don't think I've ever told you that I'm glad you didn't die. And I am. Very glad.' Jean gets up and leaves the room, closing the door behind her. Ryder slides down to sit on the floor and his head lolls back against the bed. He has believed the opposite for the last eighteen years.

It takes him a long time to get up off the floor. Long enough for the cat to come back, climb insolently over him and settle with its thrumming purr on the
red velvet bedspread. It sounds like a pneumatic drill; Ryder scrambles up and takes the box in front of him over to the window. He knows what he wants to find, and it is just as well he has a specific purpose, for ten minutes of sorting through the folders and notebooks, Bonnie's letters and photographs, is bewildering and transporting. It becomes hard not to see all that there is in her room through his own, very young, grieving eyes from almost twenty years ago.

Beneath a slide of records and an old record player decorated with stickers of rainbows and hearts, is a wooden box inlaid with an intricate mother-of-pearl pattern. Bonnie bought it at a hippie fair in Suffolk, the first time she and Ryder went off on their own together. Ryder was seventeen, and it was for him an initiation festival – he ate hash cookies, learned how to roll a joint, and drank magic mushroom tea. Thanks to Bonnie, he did not make the mistake of doing all these things at once, but over the three days they were there he seemed to be always putting himself where drugs were, thus rendering himself increasingly depraved. He got into trouble on the first night with his sister for having forgotten the ground sheet for their tent. They had to find somewhere else to go in the middle of the night. Ryder remembers trying unsuccessfully to lie on the sharp golden straws of the stubble field, mud clods in his ears, while Bonnie tried to stamp down the stalks of corn, cursing crossly.

‘We're giving up. Come on, we've got to find somewhere else to sleep.' She yanked him out of his sleeping bag.

‘You're like the bloody Princess and the Pea,' Ryder muttered to his sister as they stumbled out of their tent and across to the lighted tepee further along the campsite. Bonnie somehow decided that the lost ground sheet was directly linked to Ryder's soft-drug consumption, and she lectured him all the way home in the car the next day on the evils of addiction.

‘Fair enough,' Ryder pointed out to her, ‘except you've got three ready-rolled joints from that astrologer bloke who fancies you.' Bonnie giggled, and tried to look innocent, but Ryder knew they were stashed in the wooden box Ryder had at his feet in the car.

Now the wooden box is on Ryder's knees. He opens it, his head full of what he will find in it. He knows it with some conviction as he had put Bonnie's trinkets in it when she died. What else was he to do with her jewellery when it was given back to the family by the police?

‘You put all this somewhere safe in Bonnie's room,' someone said, and the jewellery was suddenly in his hands. They were just flimsy beads, a necklace and her special bracelet, but they were what she had been wearing. It was not difficult to know where to put them. It had been difficult to forget them.

It only takes a moment for Ryder to find what he is looking for. As soon as he opens the box it is there on top, the C-shaped silver bracelet Bonnie always wore. It is tarnished dull grey, but its purity and prettiness shine through. It has a tiny silver mouse engraved on the ball at one end, and an apple on the other, both now mistily obscure, but Ryder rubs the bracelet on
his shirt and the mouse appears. Magic. Not knowing much about three-year-old girls, he can't be sure, but he reckons there is a good chance that Miss Bella Bonnie Perrone will like this.

Bonnie didn't tell Jean and Bill she was planning to live with Mac, and that they were hunting for a house that summer. She didn't want to expose him to their disapproval, and she didn't want to discuss her boyfriend with them.

‘I'll tell them when I've seen the house we're going to live in,' she whispered to Ryder after a row because she had said she was going away again. She said that there was a party she wanted to go to.

‘There's always a party,' grumbled Bill.

‘Well, what do you expect?' Bonnie yelled at him. ‘That's what everyone does at our age. You may have forgotten, but you were young once, Dad.'

Ryder realised that she was fighting his battle for him, breaking away with all the directness and courage he loved in her.

‘Chhrrriiisst! Dad wouldn't know a party if it crept up and jumped on him!' Bonnie exploded into Ryder's room, bracelets jangling, her long hair a tangle of curls and five mini plaits she had started undoing and then forgotten about.

‘Look at these rat's tails,' she wailed, pulling at them distractedly, ‘I was trying to do a
Ten
head. You know, like that film? And I got distracted and forgot I started. Oh bugger. I'm going to miss the train. Or
maybe I'm not. What time is it?' There was a stream of thoughts and questions, no answer was needed, Ryder knew that, but she needed him to be there. He loved that mercurial energy that was uniquely his sister's. It was so much easier than having any energy himself. He sighed and lay back, staring at the ceiling, pleased with his new poster of a girl with long brown legs, walking away from the camera, her arse caught mid-swing in orange hot pants, her head turned, her mouth an ‘O' of surprise. Cute. Very cute on the ceiling. Or was it oppressive? Ryder was bored and missing Lila. She had gone travelling, and he knew although they hadn't talked about it, that the bubble of their relationship had burst. He felt impatient for the rest of his life to begin, Bonnie suddenly seemed to be so many miles ahead of him.

She was still talking. ‘Anyway, it looks stupid to do those tiny plaits if you aren't blonde.' She broke off, noticing her brother was now horizontal on his bed. ‘Are you listening?'

‘Mm. Definitely.' Maybe the poster would be better on the wall next to the shrine? Maybe there was a good reason why people didn't usually put posters on their ceiling? Lying there, Ryder decided he was not enjoying looking at the orange hot pants. They were definitely in the wrong place. The shrine was so called as it was a collection of black-and-white posters of dead people – Jim Morrison, Sid Vicious, Jimi Hendrix, Steve McQueen and Janis Joplin, in various states of decay. Steve McQueen was the one he most wanted to be. In
The Getaway
with Ali McGraw. She
could be on the ceiling in any clothes she fancied and she would never be an oppressive presence.

Bonnie scanned the room. ‘God, Ryder, you've got very retro taste. Have all the festivals we've been to turned you into an old hippie?'

Ryder threw a cushion at her and didn't bother to answer. Bonnie bounced up on to her feet and was craning to see herself in Ryder's mirror, most of which was obscured by graffiti drawings of the Jefferson Airplane logo.

‘I think I'm going to cut my hair. It looks like a wig. It's too much,' she announced. ‘Shall I?'

Ryder nodded, looking deliberately very sensible, then reaching behind himself on to the floor, he grabbed hold of a purple afro wig nesting in a jumble of old fancy dress under his bed. ‘And then you will look like this!' he said, putting it on and pouting and stretching in his version of girl posture. ‘We can be matching.' He grinned.

Bonnie pulled the wig off him and chucked it out of the open window. ‘You're stoopid,' she protested. Giggling, they both looked out to see the wig in the top of the apple tree.

‘Oops,' said Ryder, ‘better go and get it.'

‘No,' Bonnie had her hand on his arm, eyes gleaming mischief, ‘let's leave it. It can be like one of those urban myths – you know, how on earth did that mysterious purple wig get there? Like the diving suit left in a tree in the African bush.' Her eyes were shining with mischief. ‘And let's have a bet how long it will be before Mum and Dad even notice.'

Laughing, Ryder picked up a cushion and biffed her gently on the head. ‘Listen, Betsy baby,' he said in a mock-Chicago gangster voice, ‘there ain't never gonna be an urban myth about our back garden. Dream on, princess.'

She biffed him back. ‘I hate that Betsy crap. Ooh, look, I've got to go.' She sighed and ruffled his hair. ‘Oh, Kid, I wish you would come too.'

He shut the window and stretched. His hands brushed the ceiling, and inevitably the arse of the girl in hot pants. Now that was quite fun. ‘Can't. I'm going out with my mates, everyone's leaving next week and this is the last Saturday. I'll come another time next term.'

‘OK.' She was wide eyed in the mirror again, drawing kohl in a purple smudge at the corner of her eyes. ‘Take me to the train, then. I can't bear to have Dad fussing all the way to the station.'

‘Sure thing, Betsy, when d'you wanna go?' Ryder coughed and swaggered in his imaginary Raymond Chandler coat.

Bonnie scrabbled in her bag for lipstick and ran it around her mouth fast and practised as she headed out of the door, swinging back in, mock serious, to add, ‘Don't get cute with me, Kid, or I will leave you out of all the fun.'

He drove her to the station with the music up loud. They worked out she would make the connection in Ipswich.

‘If I miss it, I'll hitch-hike.'

‘Don't be stoopid, not on your own,' said Ryder.

Bonnie grinned at him. ‘Oh, you're as bad as Mac. I do it all the time, it's fine. Anyway, you do too.'

‘Yeah, but I'm a bloke.'

Bonnie made a face. ‘Stop it, Ryder! I'm sure I'll get the connection anyway.'

At the station she kissed his cheek and swung her bag on to the train. When she pulled down the window to look out, he blew her a kiss through it and shouted, ‘I'm coming up there next week, so get everything in place for me, Betsy.' And she threw him a key on a blue velvet ribbon.

‘It's the back door at Mac's – it's always open to you, Kid,' she yelled. Ryder waved her off, his big sister, pretty enough to turn the heads of three guys waiting on the platform and the station guard as she waved back, her mane of curly hair shining as she smiled the same wide grin she smiled when she was four years old.

A familiar sound at an unfamiliar hour is disorientating. The drilling of the door bell was urgent, intrusive like a warped alarm clock. Ryder swam up from deepest sleep, reluctant to return to consciousness, pushing his head further under his pillow until, irritatingly, the pillow wasn't there, and his head was burrowing against the cold plaster of the wall. God, who could be making that fucking racket? Some road workers in his parents' garden, maybe? Digging a road to nowhere? The unreal sense of having a hangover pulsed through his veins and his head
swam as he attempted to raise it from the mattress. The horrible bell stopped for a moment, and now there were voices, or maybe it was just the echo in his head of the pub last night. Then it was rattling away again, more like a chainsaw than a drill, Ryder thought, but that might have something to do with the flayed state of his senses. He groaned. Regret is such a frustrating emotion. Too late now to say no to the tequila slammers lined up on the bar. Or to throw cold water on the really stupid race he had sped through with Jack to chase the pints with a couple of vodka shots. The drinks were all downed through a game of pool and no supper, though Ryder dimly recalled a stop at the kebab shop a bit too late at a point of no return last night.