Poppyland by Raffaella Barker Page B

late and she sang along to his guitar and it didn’t feel like a family house should feel; it felt like a very embarrassing pop video. I never asked anyone home from school, and neither did Lucy. Dad never got out of the car to say hello to Mum, and I was convinced that if he did they would fall into each other’s arms and we would all live happily ever after.
    â€˜If we could just get him up the garden path . . .’ was the yearning secret wish between me and Lucy. Mum never knew, and I still don’t know if she cared.
    When Jerome leaves the studio I feel both relieved and bereft, and wander around with my arms folded as if I am hugging myself. I send Lucy an email, but the loneliness is intensified when I remember it is not even dawn yet in England. ‘
If this is long-term relationship at its functioning optimum, give me a shag pal and a bottle of oblivion
.’
    It’s tempting to write her a whole long letter, spilling all my heart out to my faraway sister, but I know I am just trying to put off my work, to displace the discomfort of doing it with a drama about Jerome. I stomp around the studio a bit; unless I give up and go home, or go into town and look at a gallery, the only thing I can do here is work. My big picture is still impenetrable, so to try to fool myself that I’m not doing anything much, I sidle up to a small canvas I have hardly begun and start painting. No form grows like I want it to. I put on Billie Holiday, and her mellifluous voice floats like a delicious scent on the air, and she helps a bit, but I can only ever get the work to flow when I can forget myself and the details of daily life and reach into my soul. I don’t ever really know when that will happen, or even how it does. But the act of applying paint to a surface, of transforming the tangled images and feelings in my head into something tangible and visible is a life-saving process. I amnot usually painting a picture for a reason, I am trying to make sense of something I cannot express any other way.
    â€˜I’ll paint you all the colours of the sea.’ I have no idea if I have read this phrase somewhere, or heard it in a song, or made it up myself, but it doesn’t matter. Something tight unclasps inside me and suddenly I know what I’m doing. It could just be crap. And it could just be a pool of blue. Making a blue with powder pigment exploding in a puff like spores, reminds me of school and the mindless pleasure of holding my ink pen on blotting paper, watching the ink well out in a gently expanding circle, creeping through the fibres of paper which in turn begin to flow with the energy of the colour itself. Blue. Limitless blue, stopping at nothing, not even the horizon where the skin of the sea meets the sky covering all. Black-blue like the cloak of night in a starless sky, or a starry night when the sky sparkles and pinprick illumination radiates electric kisses from the wide, blue distance. Of course, it isn’t the intensity of the coloured pigment that causes the ink to move through the paper; it is a combination of the absorbency of the paper and the penetrative quality of the liquid. Colour is irrelevant. How can colour ever be irrelevant? An hour of painting is like listening to music or making love – it’s restorative. I’m not thinking, I’m being. Standing back to look at what I have done makes me want a cigarette, but I don’t have one, so I bite my nails instead.
    Jerome would be furious if he saw me. It’s odd, or perhaps it’s not, that the very qualities which attractedme to Jerome five years ago when we met at that very strange exhibition in Denmark, his calm assurance, his ability to keep order in the face of chaos, his belief that he could take care of me better than I could do it myself, are now the parts of him that make me want to scream and flail my way to an escape route. But at the same time, I’ve been such a willing slave to his