Partly it’s because I’m nervous about driving all the way to London in my duct-taped McDonald’s recycling bin, but partly it’s because I want to leave part of me behind. That way I know I’ll have to come back, if only to get the car.
Over the last week, the cottage has somehow started to feel like home again. The initial shock of being there without my mother, and with Poppy, has scaled down to something bearable. More than bearable – comforting. I still find myself crying when I come across some precious Mum-related object – her nail scissors, in particular, set me off – but it is starting to feel like less of a trauma, and more of a consolation. Being here, and touching the things she touched, in such familiar surroundings.
The thought of leaving throws me off balance – as though we have created a little bubble of unreality that is allowing me to function. I suppose that’s why she asked us to move on, but I don’t have to like it.
Locking the place up, insanely checking the lights are switched off over and over again, filling the birdbath to brimming, loitering in the hallway and tidying up her coats – it’s all because I’m nervous. As though, if I leave the cottage, I’ll leave my mother behind, and never be able to recapture her.
I think Poppy is feeling some of the same thing, and she tries to make it easier by giving me the old cassette player for the journey, along with the ancient carrier bag full of tapes.
Some of them are my recordings, and some of them are Mum’s. A weird mix of Ultravox and Fleetwood Mac and Michael Jackson and a random Tracy Chapman album.
We settle on a few cassettes from about 1988, when I went through a phase where I used to record the Top Forty singles live off the radio on a Sunday. What can I say, I thought it was cool.
By the time we get to Islington, navigating our way through Oxford and the sprawling London suburbs, we’ve managed to not talk to each other at all, and instead have produced some very spirited singing along to ‘The Only Way Is Up’ by Yazz, ‘Push It’ by Salt-N-Pepa, and Guns N’ Roses doing ‘Sweet Child O’ Mine’.
She parks the car in the underground garage, and I follow her into the lifts up to her flat. She’s gone very quiet, and is jiggling her keys around nervously, her face all pursed up like a cat’s bottom. She keeps pushing her hair behind her ears, and tapping her toes, and all of the carefree energy I’ve seen in her over the last few days seems to have dried up.
I’m not sure if she’s so nervous because I’m here with her, if she’s having one of those Mum-is-dead meltdowns that we both keep having at unexpected moments, or if she’s simply slipping back into being London Poppy. If that last one is true, then I genuinely feel sorry for her, because London Poppy seems to be incredibly tense.
Her flat is in one of those old buildings that has been swished up for young professionals – all neutral colours in the hallways, and a gym in the basement, and about as much personality as a dead kipper. I’m sure it costs an arm and possibly both legs to live here, but it wouldn’t be my first choice, and I find myself already judging.
I remind myself that that is not in the spirit of the A–Z, and that I have nothing to be judgey about – it’s not like a small semi in the posh end of Liverpool is much to write home about either.
She unlocks the doors, and gestures for me to go in first, following silently behind and plonking her bags down. She picks up her mail, flicks through it, and immediately presses a button that makes the blinds swoosh open.
Sunlight floods in, and allows me to see the place properly for the first time. It’s so neat and tidy that it looks like nobody lives here. All the furniture is black leather or chrome or a combination of the two, and the biggest single item in the room is a desk, where I presume she carries out work vital to the survival of the luxury pet supplies industry.
There’s one framed photo of her and Mum – a really funny one of them both with green face masks and towel turbans – and one bookshelf, crammed with marketing manuals and that type of hardback non-fiction that’s bought as much for the way it looks as what it contains.
This surprises me, as the Poppy I knew was a voracious reader – her bookcase back at the cottage was just as crammed, but there you’d find Thomas Hardy slumming it next to Judith Krantz, and Harry Potter getting intimate with Daphne du Maurier.
‘Coffee?’ she says, sounding business-like and to the point.
‘Please,’ I reply, gazing around at the flat, trying to imagine this as my once supremely creative sister’s home and failing. It’s got an open-plan design, and I see her walk into the kitchen and slam a few cupboard doors open before she pulls a so-annoyed-I-could-scream face.
‘Sorry,’ she shouts through. ‘I ran out the night Lewis called, and I just kept forgetting to buy more … I have wine, or water.’
‘What about bread and fish? Then we could invite the five thousand round and have a party.’
She frowns at me, obviously having had a sense of humour failure, and runs the cold tap for a while. She pulls one of those water filter jugs out of the fridge, and starts to fill it up.
I notice the old tobacco tin on her desk, and it makes me smile. I’ve not seen her smoking at all recently, so she must have given up, but it’s nice to see it there – yet another blast from the past, one connection to the crazier Poppy of yesteryear.
Here, in this pristine environment, it’s hard to imagine that Poppy existing – hard to envision her sitting in this room, with its walls in a million shades of beige, and its black leather and its chrome, rolling up a joint and actually relaxing.
I sit down on the sofa, which is actually more comfortable than it looks, and wonder what the hell we’re going to do for the whole day and night. I’m feeling tense because she is, and I can’t wait to get out of here and back to Liverpool – I just wish she wasn’t coming with me.
‘I don’t have any food, I’m sorry,’ she says, passing me a glass of water and perching on her desk. ‘I just … well, I don’t have any.’
‘That’s all right,’ I say. ‘We can order a takeaway, or go out. In fact, let’s go out. We can get an early tea and have a drink. Are there any nice places round here?’
‘Loads of nice places,’ she replies, chewing her lip and frowning, ‘if you’re about twenty-five. I don’t know … this feels weird, doesn’t it? I’ve lived here for years, and it’s only now, with you sitting there on the sofa, that I’m starting to feel a bit pissed off with it. With a lot of things.’
‘What do you mean? It’s really nice. It’s a lovely flat.’
She laughs, but it sounds brittle and strained.
‘It’s a lovely flat, yes – but I should have outgrown it by now. I should have outgrown a lot of things. Like going out on the pull with women in their twenties, and never having any bloody food in the kitchen. I bet you never run out of food, do you?’
