Poppyland Read Free Page A

hugged me, ‘Oh, I’m sorry,’ she said, and tears were swimming in her eyes.
    â€˜And I’m sorry, too; the timing of everything is making this all so hard.’
    So in the end, doing this show differently is only one of the myriad things that has changed in our lives, and it is nothing to do with Lucy, and it is no one’s fault. Mum died. That’s the thing that makes life different for ever more. And now is not the time to try to come to terms with it. I have to get through this evening in Denmark and then there will be time. I shiver, afraid of just how much time there will be from tomorrow.
    I would have been in Denmark for a week by now if things had been different. I pull my knees up to my chest and hug my shins, making myself tightly small on the back seat of the cab. I wish I had someone who could have come with me, someone to talk to. Leaning back against the plumped seat back, I flirt with a wild notion of escape, of opening the door at the next traffic lights and stepping out into nowhere.
    Three weeks ago in New York, when the paintings left, I wanted to call them back, to look at them again, to give myself another final chance with them. Shock and grief are playing havoc with my mind and I am scared to admit even to myself that I have no proper memory of Mum’s face when I think of her now in the aftermath of her death, and in the same way, my pictures dissolve in bewildering chimera in my mind when I am trying to visualise them. I couldn’t command any sense of them once they had gone, and I couldn’t remember what I was trying to do with them. I kept expecting another chance, and it’s the same with Mum. I did not expect never to see her again.
    A year ago I won the award to be shown here in Denmark in a new amazing contemporary art gallery. I worked towards the show as a date, a deadline, an end in itself, without thinking much about Copenhagen or what it meant to be coming here all the way from the States on my own. To have a one-man show so far away from my life was a bigger deal than I could imagine, so I just didn’t let myself think about it. I didn’t really have time to think about anything else either; the show took a while to take shape and I was so wrapped up in the work that I didn’t notice time slipping by until all the jumbled events that make up everyday life had loomed and cleared in methodical disorder, and when it was almost time for me to leave, my work was already shipped.
    Mum was the last big thing in the way. Not Mum herself, but the way she and I could never get on,even when separated by all the dark water of the Atlantic Ocean. It wasn’t any different from how it had always been, the obstacles were the same. It had begun as small mutual childhood disappointments: hers that I was so chaotic and clumsy; mine that she couldn’t laugh when I spilled a drink. Instead, she would purse her lips and sigh, and even from the beginning, neither of us knew how to say sorry. Silence is easy to live with, and to break it is as frightening as it would be to walk through a pane of glass. Mum and I had never managed to talk to one another. Both of us could talk to Lucy, both of us loved Lucy, and she was stuck in the middle willing us to get on. But she couldn’t mend the fractured bond between us. In the end no one could.
    I was all set up to go to London on the way to Denmark, dropping in from another continent just to have a stilted pre-Christmas lunch with Mum. I had talked to Lucy and we had agreed it would work best if she came too.
    â€˜I’ll go and get her and bring her to meet you,’ Lucy had said. ‘That way there can be no ducking out.’
    â€˜I want to duck out,’ I had blurted down the phone to my sister, but she wasn’t having any of it.
    â€˜Oh no you don’t. Just remember, you live far away and you only do this once in a blue moon. I am here all the time and it’s not always