Poppyland by Raffaella Barker Page A

the table. Jerome’s skin is biscuit-brown from the trip he has just taken, a conference in Miami with other oil executives.
    â€˜Let’s hear about your trip,’ I suggest, putting my hand on his cheek. ‘You’ve been lounging around getting a bit of winter sunshine on that so-called business trip.’
    He flashes a smile. ‘There has to be fun or no one would come on these trips. The next one is diving in Greenland, can you believe? It’s to sharpen our team skills and take us into elements where we are unfamiliar.’ He pulls a parody face.
    I’m laughing now. ‘It’ll be FREEZING, who wants to be familiar with that?’
    â€˜I know, and in the presentation it looks as though we all have to wear black gimp masks with our wetsuits.’ He grins. ‘Look what you save yourself in this life of yours with just a studio and whatever is inside your head.’
    His phone bleeps, he takes it out of his pocket and turns it off without looking to see who is calling. He does this to show the conversation he is having here and now with me is important. I have seen him do it with colleagues. I sometimes guess that he sets the alarm on his phone timer to make the point. But not with me; Jerome doesn’t play games with me, and I’m glad of that.
    In the flat north light of this New York winter morning, I notice the splodge of a liver spot and a wispy thinness to his hair and I am smitten with a pang of something beyond my frustration with him.
    â€˜Oh darling, it’s awful when we pick fights, I mean when I do, I’m sorry.’
    Jerome scans my face, his whole demeanour anxious, as if I have just been diagnosed with something worrying.
    â€˜Hey, honey, it’s nothing. I guess sometimes it seems to me that you are so distant inside your head that I don’t know how to reach you, that’s all,’ he says. We are sitting side by side on the sofa now, not touching and not looking at one another. It’s a lot better for talking.
    After Dad stopped living with us we hardly saw him. Sometimes he would come and pick me up from school, but he never explained why he left, or talked about that time; he just carried on as though the strange way we now lived without him was normal. The trust between us couldn’t be repaired. It lay like a broken mirror whenever we saw one another. And all we did now was drive home from school with him which took an hour and meant we didn’t have to sit face to face and talk. My father had nice cars – or cars that I liked, at any rate, because they had cracked leather seats and shiny wood and they smelled like him, of cigarettes and cedar oil. Being with him was odd. I always hoped he was coming to rescue us. Ididn’t know him any more; he left when I was six and I thought he’d left because Mum was always crying. But maybe she was always crying because he left. I asked him once on the way home from school, ‘Why don’t you live with us any more, Dad?’
    He looked at me with tear-clouded eyes, and I shrank back against the door and wished I hadn’t asked. Men mustn’t cry, especially not Dad.
    â€˜I don’t know how to come back,’ he said. I wanted to bang my head against the dashboard, anything not to hear his sadness. I never asked again.
    Mum cried a lot, but she also liked to have fun. Her idea of fun, though, involved bringing Adrian into our lives. Adrian arrived when I was seven, and Mum had moved with us from the cliff-top house to Norwich. It was fun being in the city, but our school was a long way away and Mum didn’t have a car, so we had to go on the bus unless Dad came. Adrian arrived as a lodger, but that set-up didn’t last long. Adrian moved into Mum’s room and so did his collection of guitars. With him arrived a permanent smell of beer in the house. Mum stopped crying, but she didn’t come and sleep in our room any more. She and Adrian stayed up