Poppyland (19 page)

Bill is channel hopping. Ryder doesn't want to talk to him right now. He takes the invitation into the kitchen and sits down at the table. Without allowing himself to think, he dials the number on the letter. He has no idea what he will say, but it feels urgent and important that he makes the connection with Mac and his family.

A woman answers the phone.

‘Hello?' she sounds nice. Ryder's heart stops pounding in his mouth and he sighs and relaxes his
shoulders, he had not realised they were up by his ears.

‘Hello, I hope this isn't a bad moment to call, I'm Ryder. I got your invitation just now. Umm. I'm a friend of Mac's. Well, you know – I – I— is he there?'

There's a silence, then he hears her smile. ‘Ryder, yes, of course. I'm – I mean this is Lucy speaking.' It isn't that he is thinking this could have been Bonnie, it's just that speaking to Lucy now, Ryder has the sense of walking off the edge of a cliff. He truly believes in this moment that anything is possible, tragedy, triumph or a life full of ordinary happiness. No one has the monopoly on any of it. He wonders what Lucy looks like, and, meanwhile, he is talking to her.

‘Hello. Yes, you had to be you. Congratulations on everything. I think I mean felicitations actually, that's what you say to girls, isn't it?' He laughs a bit. Oh God, he feels anxious, his heart is pounding, his shoulders have risen again. This is the wife of Mac, oh, get it right – Mac's wife. She's the mother of Mac's child, or rather children. She sounds sweet and gentle. She has called their daughter Bonnie. She's an angel. She's speaking again, laughing too.

‘Oh. Thank you, yes. Well. Anything is lovely. How . . . How . . .? Oh, I'm so glad that you've rung. Mac will be thrilled. Hang on, I'll get him.'

Buoyed by her welcome, not knowing what he expected, and dizzy with relief, Ryder realises his voice is booming crassly. He crosses the kitchen and goes out through a small dark utility room into the back garden. The tabby cat is in there when he opens
the door, it chirrups as it passes him, curling like smoke around the door on the route back into the house. Ryder breathes in deep the spring air, and forgets to breathe out as a voice he had forgotten he knew comes on the line.

‘Ryder, I'm so glad you rang. I wanted to call you, and I just haven't got round to it yet—'

‘Mac?' Ryder's eyes smart. This is new, this feeling of generosity he is experiencing towards Mac and his sweet wife. Hearing him doesn't bring Bonnie back now, as he always believed it would. It brings a wish to know Mac and to see him again.

‘Hey, how's it been, Kid?' Mac's voice is hesitant, and achingly familiar. No one has called him Kid for a long time. Ryder walks out through the back gate of the garden and on to the golf course. It's almost dark, the windows in some of the houses along the edge of the fairway glow, and the town looks cosy and safe.

‘It's been good,' he says, surprised to find that ‘good' is the word that comes first from his heart. He rubs his eyes, and bends closer over the phone. ‘Well, you know, it's been everything you can imagine, Mac, and some more, but from where I am at this moment, it's good.'

Mac pauses, Ryder hears his breath hiss, ‘Yes. I can imagine,' he says. ‘Where are you at this moment, anyway?'

‘On the golf curse – sorry, I mean course – behind my parents' bungalow in deepest Deepham, Essex.'

They both laugh. Ryder goes on, ‘I had to call. I want you to know I am coming to your christening.
It's been a while, but on 25 May, I will be there in your lovely garden with you all, and lifting a glass to your baby girls. In fact, are they babies? I don't want to sound ignorant or anything, but I am – how old are they?'

Mac's voice is full of laughter. ‘Not at all ignorant, how could you know? Bella is three and Catherine is nearly one. They can both walk all over me, literally and metaphorically.'

Ryder grins too. ‘Yeah, I can imagine,' he says, and as he says it, he realises that he can't at all. ‘Actually, I can't imagine, but I'd love to see you and meet everyone.'

‘Come and visit us any time, not just the christening,' says Mac. ‘I am so pleased to hear you. I hoped you would come, I'd love Jean and Bill to come too. It took a while to find out their new address. When did they leave Foxley?'

‘Nine years ago.'

‘It's a good thing, Kid, you know.'

Mac's voice full of empathy down the phone is like a big enveloping hug. Ryder takes a deep breath, and nods. ‘Yes,' he agrees, ‘it's a very good thing. They've got a life here they seem to like.'

‘That's good,' Mac answers. ‘And how about you, Kid? Married? Kids? Or life on the open road?'

Ryder grins. ‘I live on a boat. Like that mate of yours in Norwich we visited all those years ago.'

Mac laughs. ‘God, you mean Jules. I remember that boat. I'd be amazed if it's still afloat, it was riddled with holes and stuck together with putty. Man, we
had a good summer that year. You and me and Bonnie.'

Ryder sends a silent prayer of thanks to somewhere that Mac has mentioned her, and even his posture relaxes now there is no taboo.

‘We did. I must say, I haven't been in Norfolk much since, but your christening is well worth making the trip for.'

‘I hope so,' agrees Mac, ‘but Ryder. I don't think this is the moment, but when is the fucking moment – what the hell! I want to ask you if you will be Bella's godfather?'

‘Bill and Jean may have to be chipped out of their concrete foot moulds to get them up your way—' Ryder is in relief mode, on rollicking overdrive. But suddenly he stops, mid-air, free-falling into what he has just heard Mac say.

‘You what? What did you say, Mac?'

‘I said, Lucy and I would like to ask you to be Bella's godfather. I hope it's not an imposition to ask. We wanted to give you time—' Mac stops, Ryder hears Lucy's voice murmur something in the background.

Mac comes back. ‘Yeah. We don't want you to feel pressurised. Take a while and think about it. Please.' He pauses then speaks again. ‘Perhaps I should have written to ask you, I don't know. But it's been a while, hasn't it, Kid?'

Ryder finds tears ache in his eyes. He doesn't need time. ‘No. Yes, it has been a while. Too long, Mac. I accept, of course I do. I feel honoured. I would love that so much. Thank you.'

‘Hey, Kid, I'm glad. It means a lot to me, you know that.'

‘To me too,' says Ryder. ‘I'll see you then.' He clicks the phone shut and walks back towards the night-lit houses.

The spare room in the bungalow is too hot. Ryder wakes gasping in the stuffiness and opens the window. A rush of birdsong and a breath of sweet air pour in. He lies in bed, the corner of the morning available to him through the gap in the small, stiff curtains is heavenly blue, and a lilac bush nods and rustles, scratching the glass of the open window and wafting in a scent of pure spring and a sense of stolen early morning time. Ryder yanks the curtain back without getting out of bed, and closes his eyes against the beating gold as the sun seems to double in strength and direct its efforts to warming him. The sunshine on his skin is blissful; Ryder floats into a trance, his body is a weightless vehicle for a syrup-like sense of well-being and, cocooned, he drifts away. When he next wakes, a breeze has got up and the cat has left a trail of give-away sooty foot prints on the windowsill and down the wall, and settled on the small of Ryder's back with its purr on full throttle. Ryder surfaces from a dream about motorbikes to find himself the victim of a rhythmical kneading assault. The wellbeing has departed, he can tell he has overslept by the height of the sun in the sky, and is instantly annoyed; he resents the bloody cat's assumption that
he is a cushion. It seems to weigh a lot, it seems to weigh him down a lot. It gives him claustrophobia. He throws back the sheet and gets out of bed. The cat leaps on to the floor and sits by the door looking offended and meowing fatly. It bats the door, managing to make a lot of noise for something billed as stealthy. Ryder cannot remember its name, or rather he can, but he chooses not to, pointlessly making a stand of defiance which nobody will be interested in. At least he hasn't kicked it or performed any other act of malevolence towards it.

In the kitchen, he fills the kettle. No one is around, although the murmur of the radio suggests his parents are in the house. Piano music ripples, and Ryder could be seven again.

His father always played Radio 3 loudly enough to avoid conversation while he made coffee for himself and cooked porridge for Ryder and Bonnie before school. This only happened on the rare occasions that Jean went away to visit her mother, but Bonnie and Ryder always enjoyed Bill's moments of domesticity and the unchanging nature of his routine.

The radio beeps on the hour, and Ryder wanders through the house with his cup of tea. Although he doesn't recognise that he had a purpose, he stops when he comes to the door of the room at the end of the hall. He opens the door. The curtains are drawn and the room smells faintly of incense, a hint of patchouli oil and roses. The smell is utterly reminiscent of Bonnie and turns Ryder's insides upside down when he breathes in. He sits down on the red velvet
bed cover. It is scattered with embroidered yellow suns in the middle of which are tiny mirrors, and it used to hang over Bonnie's bed, like the festooned ceiling of a harem. Or so he liked to tease her when winding her up. Teasing Bonnie never worked unless she wanted to play the game. Otherwise she just ignored him, rolling her eyes as she lit more joss sticks to hide the smell of cigarettes smoked furtively out of the window.

It is suddenly clear that the reason he has come in here is to find a present to give to his new god-daughter – his only god-daughter, in fact – as a memento of her namesake. Not easy, as he has very little experience of small girls and their taste, but they can't be hugely dissimilar to grown-up girls, and he likes to think he knows what they like, up to a point. He wonders if he needs to ask his mother if it's OK for him to have something from here, something of Bonnie's?

For a moment he has a sense of seeing himself from above. Here he is in Essex with his parents at this soulless house of theirs. It's not his home, it never has been, it's a kind of holding station for their grief. It's odd to realise that while his parents have kept everything that belonged to Bonnie, somewhere along the way he got left out. Perhaps it was because he has a house or rather a boat of his own that they, not unreasonably, didn't make a room or even part of a room for Ryder when they moved here. It's not that he resents it. At the time, he rose to the challenge that this brought, viewing it as freeing and independent-making to not have any ties in his parents' house but, with hindsight, it just seems
oddly thoughtless, careless even, as though his feelings don't need to be considered because he enjoys the luxury of being alive. He can make his own way in the world whereas Bonnie is only a memory and she needs them to sustain her. On the mantelpiece in the sitting room there are his football cups, and in the loo there are photographs of him in teams, but his stuff, his paraphernalia, his football boots and leather jacket, his posters and the big green bean bag covered in a red-cherry motif, even his books have all vanished, given to jumble sales, thrown away, just gone. The way things do in life. The only things Ryder has retained himself is his record collection. This room, which in everyone's head is called Bonnie's room though no one says it, has been haphazardly arranged. Arranged in that the bed, the dressing table and the wardrobe are all in the place they would be in if someone used it as a bedroom, but the reality ends there. Black dustbin bags and boxes spilling books and peacock feathers, rolled-up posters, necklaces, clothes and curling photographs fill the floor space. The dressing table is stacked with small boxes and ornaments, there is no room anywhere for a person; the room is too full of memories.

More than anything, it looks like a film set; it has all the props to create a student's room, but none of the personality that inhabits it and brings it alive. Not sure what he is looking for, but trying to focus on something, Ryder opens the wardrobe door. Inside there are dresses and a long dark green coat; they have hung there for years without being looked through, without being pulled out, tried on, chosen
or rejected. They have a look of inauthenticity about them and, pulling a flounce of a black-and-white-striped dress, he remembers Bonnie wearing it to his football team's ‘Graphic' party. It was one of many parties held in that long-ago last summer. Parties given to mark the end of the lives they had all led as teenagers. Most of the football team was going to university, and Ryder and two team-mates had made an invitation they were very pleased with, showing graphic sex. Or bits of it. Of course, in the end, it wasn't at all graphic, but they had a lot of fun doing it nonetheless. Most people had taken this, not art as the theme. Bonnie was just about the only girl with clothes on, the rest were wearing skincoloured bikinis. Lila had come to stay that night. She didn't often come back to his house, because he found Bill and Jean too embarrassing. ‘What about my parents?' Lila countered. ‘They only pretend to be laid-back hippies; underneath they're probably more uptight than yours are.' Lila had drawn a very pretty nude body on to a suede dress. And even better, as Ryder knew, she had a very pretty body under the suede dress too. In the living room, before Lila, Bonnie and Ryder left for the party, Bill hardly looked up from the news on television when they walked in to say goodbye. Jean, however, leapt from her chair as if she had been scalded, and threw her handkerchief at Lila.

‘Oh, thank you.' Lila was surprised, but she took the handkerchief and held it. Ryder looked at his mother in astonishment.

‘You're mad, Mum. You were trying to cover her up, weren't you?' Lila and Bonnie burst out laughing at the absurdity of the idea, but Jean blushed. Ryder felt a pang of sorrow for his mother's unease. Bonnie drove them home after the party, chatting to Jack all the way, until they dropped him at the end of the track where his parents' farmhouse was. Bonnie was on form. She was always quite happy driving and not drinking, and, Ryder honestly felt, though he never said so, she was not suited to drink – it made her maudlin and seemed to erase her judgement entirely. He sighs now, nostalgic for a time when life was effortless.