Summer
Poppies.
‘Do
you ever think of suicide?’ I wonder now if your psychiatrist condemned
me or liberated me when he asked you that question. Before we set off for your appointment I went into the garden and was greeted by
the gentle beauty of the poppies, which had flowered in the bright warmth of
the morning. Tissue paper faces of marshmallow pink, parma violet, rice-paper
white and glorious cardinal red nodding approval against the rough-cast wall.
The day before their engorged, warty buds had
given no indication of their intent to bloom and their surprise appearance
suffused me with an intense happiness. My delighted ‘Hello!’ had slipped out
without warning and I had looked around, embarrassed that someone might have
caught me greeting the poppies.
‘Yes,’ you replied, ‘every day I pray for the strength to kill myself’. For some reason all I could think of was the
poppies. Your head nodded in time with the shuddering sobs that reduced your
great stature to child-like dimensions and all I could see was the nodding
delicacy of those hopeful flowers.
When we got home some of the fleshy petals with their
inky veins had already dropped. I felt your dark despair reaching out to me
with its treacherous fingers and while you lay on the stairs and cried noisily
for yourself, I knelt silent in the sandy soil and collected the fallen petals.
They were bruised and wilted and wasted and they left behind the vulnerable
naked heads of the stems. Empty seedpods.
That night the bedroom seemed unfamiliar and the cold silver
light of the summer moon painted your face white as you slept. The air moved
ominously in the shadows and like the sudden flowering of the poppies, the seed
of dread that you had planted with that sentence burst into parasitic life.
Poppies. Opium poppies. Drugs. There were enough in the house to answer your
prayers. Had you already taken them? I leaned close to your marble features and
held my breath as I listened for your breathing, felt your heart beating, so
much slower than my own. I prayed to your God. I begged and bartered
and I lay raw eyed and alert until the alarm clock forced me to leave you in
the hands of a killer.
After that the parasite took over. The danger was
everywhere. I emptied the house of all of the pills but couldn’t take your
daily cocktail of survival away.
Searching for pills in the bathroom my hand brushed the bleach and
knocked your razor and the endless possibilities spewed into my mind. The
knowledge of your danger engulfed me, and with it came utter helplessness. Fear
was a blood-borne disease that infiltrated me. Spitefully reminding me of its
presence with each inhalation, each exhalation. With each contraction of my
heart I saw yours fibrillating to a standstill.
And each day you survived. Marooned in misery. Waiting for a tiny spark
to give you the strength you needed.
I remember the first dream. The first nightmare. It
happened after I found you standing transfixed under the ancient sycamore like
a garden statue. A light breeze fingered the branches and a cascade of winged
seeds rained around you, and the old rope swing stirred. I was reminded of the
early days, when we leaned into each other on that swing, heedless of the
splintered seat. How we laughed as the confetti of sycamore seeds pirouetted
around us. Your breath on my hair. My reminiscing was halted when you reached
out and touched the rope and I realised you were assessing its suitability for
a different task. That night I awoke to
find the bed cold. The next thing I knew I was standing beneath the sycamore.
Again the moon had silvered your face and you swayed back into black hollows
and forth into silver shafts. The rope was noosed into your neck and the
confetti fell about us like tickertape. You swayed into silver and I saw that
your eyes dripped blood and your tongue protruded, mangled in your frozen
grimace. My screaming woke me to find you lying damp eyed next to me. Praying
for the strength.
The dreams began to infect my daily life. I was plagued
with hideous premonitions. The depression was contagious and was reflected in
the quelled spirit of that grey, wet summer.
The swollen rivers escaped their bonds to spill over the floodplains,
rotting the crops and stranding the desperate livestock on ever decreasing
spots of safe ground. High tide transformed meadows to great gushing lakes that
uprooted trees in the torrents.
At
work I heard that a body had been seen in the Eden and I knew it was you. No
reply when I phoned home. Again. Floating and slack like the sheep that had
been drowned and washed away. Your spaniel eyes feasted on by fish. Your face,
that face, deformed, blue and bloated. That slaughter house stench. I knew that
when I got home you would be gone and felt the ever present parasite begin its
manic dance. I left work early. But I
was wrong. You were there, lying at that point on the stairs. Where no-one
could see if they looked in. Beyond sobbing now. But dry and safe and alive and
for a second I thought my own heart had stopped as I lurched onto the steps
below you. All encompassing relief that ignited a flicker of something else. I
wonder if that’s when the parasite began to mutate.
The day that you left your safe haven of the stairs, left
the house and disappeared, was cold and the crisp air of a well established
autumn lingered about the trees. Normally my favourite season, all I could see
as I searched were endings. The trees discarded their last leaves and they
fluttered hopelessly to the ground. The multitude of warm tones of the leaves
had reduced to brown. Just brown and desiccated, decaying, while twigs snapped
like fragile bones under my feet. In the woods a jay flashed his summer sky
stripes at me and laughed. An omen. Or a joke. You were sitting by the railway
line, too close. The galloping thud of my heart in my ears was drowned out by
the commuter train flashing past and I could see you through the massive
threshing wheels. We walked home hand in
hand even as the parasite breathed its poison into me and my jaw ached.
Eventually I left you at the hospital, and as I drove
away you gored me with those spaniel eyes. For twelve miles your gentleness
assaulted me and your almost wave beat me and beat me and beat me. I lived
alone for months while they wired up your neurons and shocked away the sorrow
that had suffocated you. They played with your blood chemistry until you
vomited their experimental toxins back at them. They oozed empathy and cited
statistics. There were occasional
wrenching glimpses of an old friend but ultimately he was subjugated by the
process .Or perhaps by the therapy. I don’t know who came home wearing your
clothes but not your face.
It was different this time. I found this stranger lying
still in cold bath water with a razor blade poised in his hand, his mind in
tatters and his skin in-tact. There was inwardly
focused intent in eyes that were still brown but no longer spaniel like. No
longer yours. Before it was the pills, the blades, the noose, the train-tracks
but now the enemy had assumed a human shape. Masquerading as you. Deep in my
core the parasite emerged as something hard and brittle. Guilt edged, it
simmered and shouted for self-preservation, more insistent than any love of
spaniel eyes and summer poppies.
It
got its selfish way. The fear and dread of discovery ground me into submission.
When you wanted solitude my voice was loud in its silence. I left you to your
war and retreated to a safer place wearing my yellow dress and white feather.
It was a tortuous demise, expecting the news that never came. Sometimes over
the years I’d hear about you from mutual friends. Advancing, retreating,
falling, re-grouping. Fighting your war.
Always fighting your war. And I wonder if the real you ever came home.
And still, with the miles and the years between us, each
summer in this different place, this different garden, the poppies flower and
delight me and I remember the happiness of that morning before he asked ‘Do you ever think of suicide?’ and you
replied ‘Yes, every day I pray for the
strength to kill myself’.
_____________________
First Love.
As you walk down Pear
Tree Lane towards the stables the houses straggle out until they admit defeat
to the countryside. The innocent white blossom of the hawthorn laces the
hedge-row and its delicacy belies the lethal spars hidden beneath, capable of
impaling three inches into unwary flesh. It towers into long thickets that are
impenetrable to all but the most determined, or possibly the most desperate.
Perhaps that’s how he felt when he made his den deep in the densest of the
thickets. Away from the lane and camouflaged into invisibility. Maybe lair
would be a more appropriate term given his intentions.
You’re at a disadvantage when your stalker has
been trained by the British Army in covert operations and surveillance. It’s
probably best not to think about prowess in ‘seek and destroy’ missions and
unarmed combat. Suffice to say that when you gaze at the glory of the English
country-side in May, you don’t see that terror can lurk behind its beauty. But ‘you
live and learn’ as they say. Just as they say that you always remember your
first love.
I remember mine. Tears or joy on Platform 4 at the
railway station. Long months of waiting, yearning and short weeks of delighted
discovery and whispered promises. Letters. It took four agonising days from
when he licked the envelope at the Army Base until it dropped through the
letter box. He wrote of love. I sent mine by return post. He came on leave, bringing little gifts. I
don’t remember him giving me the spectacles with their tinted lenses, but at
some point I put them on and found that they wouldn’t come off. He was posted
back to England. His wild, exaggerated stories were fun and I didn’t understand
why people called him Walter Mitty and cooled towards him. Tales began to
crawl, uninvited, to my home and I plugged my ears and insulated myself against
them.
Then came the call to Northern Ireland. A war zone. A dark place for a British soldier. Fear swept in, drowning all other conscious thoughts. When casualties were announced on the BBC news something cold and black slid over me,
compressing my chest so that I couldn’t breathe properly. Finally, finally he
called to say he was alright and the relief left me numb and older. But he
wasn’t alright. Something in his world had altered, changing the workings of
his mind.
Home again, the stories became outright lies, impossible
to ignore. He would be out of contact for days, before returning with no
explanation. An enquiry would precipitate a strange shift in those blue eyes, a
frightening stillness, like a dog about to strike. And it felt safer to
placate. Yet still the view through those lenses persisted, faded now, like
blown pink roses at the end of summer.
That slow beat of life changed its rhythm on the day I
got home to find two men waiting for me. Special Investigation Branch. He had been under
surveillance for theft and fraud and had gone AWOL. They showed me the letters
he had received from, and written to, other girls, professing love, planning
futures. Differing from those he wrote to me only by the name at the start. Dated
back for the three years that we had been together. The pink glasses cracked and shattered along
with some deep, vital, honest part of me. They asked me to turn him in. If only
I’d listened.
He
denied it all. That now familiar change came over him. That stillness. But this
time there was no retreat on my part and he drew back and fired his spittle
onto my cheek as he pressed against me and told me that I’d never leave him.
How he would make sure that if he couldn’t have me no-one would. Igniting a sharp
fear. Then he was gone.
Often my peripheral vision registered a familiar shape,
but when I turned to look he had vanished.
The spark of fear began to smoulder. When I answered the phone there
would be silence. I could feel his malevolence down the line. He only spoke
once, to say he was watching me. When I saw him at dusk, boldly standing in the
garden watching the house, the smouldering whooshed into a gut churning inferno
and I ran to phone for help. By the time I called the police he was gone.
Fear was constantly there, whispering to beware. He
turned up at work, on the bus, always hovering on the periphery, waiting for an
opportunity until I became reluctant to leave the house. But I had to attend to
my horse. As I walked down Pear Tree Lane a breeze built up and hissed
ominously through the leaves, warning me that I wasn’t alone. I dared not look
behind but some deep instinct told me he was there. My chest felt as though it
couldn’t contain my heart which was exploding into my throat. On leaden legs I
tried to run and heard the footsteps behind me faster than mine, powerful,
gaining on me, and I could feel his darkness bearing down on me with appalling
speed. I raced screaming into the safety of the stable yard and the owner ran
to catch me as my legs gave way and I fell sobbing to the floor. Again the
police were called. Again he had vanished. Arrangements were made for someone
else to care for my horse. My life shut down.
When I was informed that he had been caught, freedom
fizzed through me with each liberated heart beat. He had been living rough for
months, bivouacked in the hawthorn by the stables. Watching and waiting. I felt the delicious stability
of safety. I began to live again and attended a friend’s work’s Christmas Party
at a remote venue way out in the Pennines. The party was in full swing and I
was squashed in the throng of revellers with Slade’s ‘Merry Christmas’ pounding
away. Suddenly he was in front of me, a
pint in one hand and an odd smile below even odder eyes. Stunned disbelief
halted everything. I grasped for my voice but it had deserted me along with my
breath. He pushed me into an alcove. My scream was shut off by him grabbing my
jaw and wrenching my head back, smashing it against the stone wall. In the red
flare of pain I knew that he was going to kill me and understood what it was to
be paralysed by fear. Holding me by the neck with his right hand he relaxed and
looked straight into my eyes and for a second there was almost a connection.
Then his mouth curled into a grimace and he lunged towards me with his left
hand, still holding the pint. At the last second he diverted, driving the glass
against the wall, inches from my face, covering me with broken glass and the
lager stench of reprieve, then he turned and ran. Again he disappeared.
The police found no sign of him and felt that it was safe
to leave while they continued their search. My parents had arrived in a taxi to
take me home. There was nothing around but the moon lying heavy on the hills illuminating
the unmade track that led to the road. As we bumped along, there was a sudden
blurred movement from the side and he leapt out of the night and clung onto the
back of the taxi like something out of a horror film. His face was that of an
animal. The driver accelerated desperately and the taxi bumped wildly throwing
him off. Rid of him we sped home.
I
have never seen him since. I’ve moved house several times but I know that twice
he has traced my address. Nearly thirty years later I am still wary. He is
still out there. I scan faces in crowds and watch the land around me. Who knows
what lurks in the woods. I screen my phone-calls and choose my friends
carefully. I like to see who is approaching my home. As they say; you always remember your first
love.
__________________________
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