One
People say you can’t die in your dreams but last night I felt I was going to die. I was falling, like she fell, and it was just before I hit the concrete—dark, rushing up at me—that I woke, gasping, sweating. I hadn’t got away. It was happening again.
I tried to think of a smooth sea, of a blue sky, of a forest with the wind gently stirring the leaves. It didn’t work.
I was awake but I was still in the dream. I was back where it all began.
I was sitting in the window seat of a café off Broadway Market. I was early and so I saw Jason and Poppy before they saw me. For a brief moment it was as if nothing had changed. Poppy was riding on Jason’s shoulders, clutching his ears, her mouth open in precarious joy, her glorious red hair like a banner in the soft breeze. The father with his little daughter, walking down the street toward the waiting mother.
Even at that moment, even though I had come here straight from being with Aidan, and had walked to the café in the glorious May warmth, feeling alive with hope and desire and excitement and a sense of life unfurling, I felt a ripple of sadness. Poppy was so small, so vulnerable and trusting. And Jason and me, we’d done this to her—split her life in half. But we would make it better, together.
I watched as they drew closer. Jason was holding Poppy’s legs so that she was steady and he looked like he was singing. He had a nice voice; he always used to sing loudly in the shower. He probably still did.
As they passed the window, he saw me and gave that familiar, funny half-smile, as if there was a shared joke between us, like in the early days. He put Poppy’s little overnight bag on the pavement so that he could lift her up and off and down to the ground. Poppy pointed excitedly at me, then put her face to the window, her nose squashing against the glass and her breath misting it. “Mummy,” she was saying soundlessly.
I stood up and met her at the door and hugged her and she pressed her face into my shoulder. She smelled like sawdust and sap. I’d assumed Jason would leave immediately, but he ordered coffee for himself and a hot chocolate for Poppy and we all sat down at the table. Poppy wriggled onto my lap and I looked at Jason a little uneasily. I was always anxious to avoid any competition for her affection. But he just smiled.
He was still good-looking. There were gray flecks in his neatly trimmed beard; he was bulkier. He was a grown-up now, a headmaster, he had status, but I could see the young man I’d fallen for—the young man who’d fallen for me.
I had a sudden, vivid memory of that first evening all those years ago. It had happened so quickly, right at a time when I was thinking I never wanted to get involved with another man, ever again. I was emerging from a spectacularly distressing breakup. My boyfriend of seven years—my first real love—had gone off with a close friend, someone I’d known for most of my life. I lost them both. Even the past I shared with them was wrecked by lies. It had left me a frail, raw, sore, pulpy mess of a human being.
But on a spring day like today, full of blossom and fresh green leaves, my friend Gina had persuaded me to go to a party with her. She said it would do me good and wouldn’t take no for an answer. She stood over me while I put on a dress that looked more like a sack, and brushed my long red hair, and refused to wear makeup. Jason was there, tall and rangy, with gray eyes, a cleft in his then-beardless chin, and a faded blue cotton shirt. I could still remember how he looked at me and didn’t look away. We got talking. We danced together and I felt the heat of his body. I suddenly thought: so my life isn’t ruined after all; so I am still desirable and I can still feel desire; so my boyfriend was a scumbag and my girlfriend crap, but I can still laugh and dance and have sex and feel life rippling through me. I can begin again.
We’d gone on to a bar in Camden High Street. I remember I had a tequila and my head swam and I was thinking to myself that I had to be careful, I mustn’t be a fool, not again. Jason laid his hand over mine, told me that he was with someone else and it was as if he had slapped me. I was suddenly sober. I said I wasn’t going to get involved with anyone who was in a relationship. I knew what it felt like to be betrayed. Jason nodded, kissed me on the cheek, a bit too close to my mouth, and we said goodbye and I thought I would never see him again.
The next day, he texted me. I could still remember it word for word: I’ve just broken up. No pressure. But I’d love to see you.
Now we were here, all those years later, with our beautiful three-year-old daughter, and in July it would be the first anniversary of our separation. So much promised and so much lost. It hadn’t been a divorce because we’d never married. But we’d shared a child and a house and a life.
The young, fresh-faced barista came over with the drinks. She put the large mug of hot chocolate in front of Poppy.
“This is for you, young lady, I guess.”
Poppy glared at the woman, who looked disconcerted.
“She’s a bit tired,” said Jason.
“I’m not tired,” said Poppy firmly, but she had that twitchiness about her. A storm was coming.
The woman raised her eyebrows and moved away.
“How was your weekend?” I asked.
Jason looked at Poppy. “How was it, Poppy?”
“It rained.”
“Well, not all the time.”
“It rained and it rained and it rained.”
“I know, honey. You and me and Emily played games and you did pictures and you cooked with Emily.”
Emily was Jason’s wife. She really was his wife. This time Jason had got married. Poppy had gone to their wedding. I had made a yellow dress for her and washed her hair the night before, and later I saw the photograph of the three of them, a whole new family without me in it.
“That sounds good,” I said, trying to sound like I meant it. I did mean it, I told myself. How could I not want Poppy to have a good time? I looked at my ex-partner. “Thanks, Jason.”
Jason smiled again, his small, secret smile inviting my complicity: him and me against the world. He’d always been like that.
“We’re doing OK, aren’t we?”
“How do you mean?”
“Us two.” He gestured toward Poppy, who was dangerously lifting her mug. “People make such a mess of it. They turn on each other. We haven’t done that.”
I slid my eyes to Poppy. She had chocolate round her mouth and she was carefully blowing into her drink. Poppy often seemed to be in her own world, not paying attention, but she was a human sponge, soaking up everything. It was impossible to know what she saw, what she heard, what she understood.
“We haven’t.”
“And we won’t.”
When we agreed to separate, we laid down ground rules: never to be angry with each other in front of Poppy. Never to compete for her. Never to try and buy her affection with treats and toys, or not be firm with her about behavior or the structure of her days. Never to let any disagreements leak out into our relationship with her. Never to criticize the other to her. Always to collaborate on how we raised her. Always to assume that we had her best interests as a priority and to trust each other as parents. And so on. There were loads of them. It was like a self-help book. Jason wrote them all down and he emailed them to me, as if it were a contract. And by and large we had kept to it.
I looked at the man who was the father of my child. He used to hate buying clothes for himself, so I would buy them. The jacket was a birthday present I’d got him three years earlier. But I hadn’t bought his patterned shirt. I hadn’t been with him when he chose that pair of soft leather shoes. I unfolded a paper napkin and wiped Poppy’s mouth.
“Shall we head off, poppet?”
As we stood up, Jason leaned close, almost as if he were going to kiss me, but instead he whispered something.
“Sorry?”
“Everything will be all right.”
“What?” said Poppy.
“We’re just saying goodbye,” said Jason.
The shared entrance to my flat was always cluttered with junk mail. Bernie, who lived upstairs, kept his bike there and he was lifting it off its rack as I opened the door.
“Tess!” he said, as if I’d been away for months. “And Poppy!” He leaned forward with a look of concern. “Is everything all right?”
He was about my age, in his midthirties, thin, with muddy brown eyes, brown hair in a ponytail and a wispy brown beard. The tops of two of the fingers on his left hand were missing, which Poppy always found fascinating, and he had a habit of standing just a little bit too close to people. He stooped down to Poppy and she took a step back and stared at him with round eyes.
“She’s tired,” I said and slid a toe through the mess of letters. A couple of envelopes were addressed to me: more bills.
“If I can do anything,” he said.
I mumbled something that I hoped was both polite and discouraging.
Our cat was waiting at the door of the flat. I’d taken Sunny when I left and I’d taken my old sewing machine and my garden tools and almost nothing else. I hadn’t taken the pictures, the furniture and light shades and mismatched plates and glasses, the Christmas decorations, all the stuff that we had chosen together and accumulated over the years and which would remind me of those early days of happiness and then how they slipped away. I needed to shut the door on all of that but I couldn’t have left Sunny behind with Jason and Emily in Brixton, even though he had lived in that house for years. He was my companion, old and fat and scruffy, his coat a fading orange, with disapproving green eyes, a limp and a ragged ear.
Poppy picked Sunny up, his legs dangling uncomfortably from between her arms, and hefted him into her bedroom. It was the first room I’d decorated when we moved in, putting up shelves, making the sky-blue curtains, painting the walls, assembling the bed, buying bed linen and bright throws and the little wicker chair. Poppy had helped me, choosing colors and standing beside me when I rolled on the paint, laying on small clean licks of paint with the brush I’d got for her.
I unpacked Poppy’s bag, putting the dungarees into a drawer, tossing the tee shirt, knickers and socks into a corner to be washed. I took out the squashy teddy with button eyes and the slightly shabby rag doll, Milly, with her red felt skirt and hair of orange wool, and half-tucked them into her bed, according to Poppy’s strict instructions. Poppy wouldn’t go to sleep without them on either side of her. I returned Poppy’s favorite picture books to her bookshelf and put the pouch of pens and crayons on the desk.
At the bottom of the bag was a pile of paper: Poppy’s pictures from the weekend. I sat on the bed.
“Can you show me your drawings?”
Poppy sat beside me, the cat sliding off her lap. I looked down at the small figure. Pale-skinned, dark-eyed, with unequivocally red hair, redder than mine. A fierce, demanding, joyful little girl who still didn’t understand what was happening in her life. The thought of it gave me an ache in my chest.
The first picture consisted of a bright orange splurge at the top and dotted streaks of blue below.
“Is that the sun?”
“It rained,” said Poppy.
“It’s beautiful.”
This was followed by a creature I thought was a lion or a horse; a princess; a house; all of them in yellows and reds and blues.
“These are great. I’m going to choose one of them and put it above my bed, so I can look at it and think of you.”
Poppy seemed unimpressed by this.
I lifted the house and came to the final picture. It was so different that for a moment I wondered whether there had been some mistake, whether it had been drawn by someone else. It was entirely in thick black crayon. It was simple and basic and violent. There was what looked like a lighthouse or tower and next to it, at the top of the tower, if it was a tower, was one of Poppy’s triangular figures, with legs and arms like angry sticks coming out of it and a clotted scribble of black around the head. The figure was slanted, with its head pointed downward.
“Is that a tower?”
“It is a tower.”
I wasn’t sure that Poppy wasn’t just repeating back to me what I’d said. I pointed to the figure.
“Who’s that?”
Poppy put a finger on the head with the scrawl of dark lines around it.
“I done her hair.”
“Did,” I said faintly. “But who is it? Is it an angel? A fairy?”
“A fairy godmother.”
I stared at the jagged lines with a sense of disquiet.
“Is she flying?”
“No.”
“Is it a story? Is it a magic story?”
“She was in the tower.”
“Like Rapunzel?”
“Her,” said Poppy, jabbing at the figure in the picture.
“No, I mean, is that someone in a story?”
“He did kill her.”
“What?”
“He did kill. Kill and kill and kill.”
“Darling, what are you saying. Who?”
But now Poppy was confused and she said she was hungry, and then she said she wanted to have been a cat, and then she started to cry. I put the pictures on the desk, except for the one in black crayon, which I took with me.
Two
I dreamed someone was calling me and then blearily realized it wasn’t a dream. I slid out of bed, still half asleep, and went into Poppy’s room, turning on the bedside lamp. Poppy was sitting up, her hair wild and her face a tragic mask. I could smell and feel what had happened.
“Don’t worry about that. Let’s get you clean and dry and I’ll put some new sheets on your bed.”
“I did it.”
“Did what?”
“I did wet it.”
“It’s just a little accident.”
Though Poppy hadn’t wet her bed for many months, I thought, as I pulled clean pajamas onto her and stripped the bed.
“Climb into my bed,” I said, “while I get this done. Take Teddy and Milly with you.”
“I did it. I did it.” Her face puckered up and she started to sob.
“Never you mind.”
“Don’t hit me!”
“Hit you! What are you saying? Of course I won’t hit you. I’ll never hit you, my darling one. Come with me.”
Poppy slept with me for the rest of the night. She pressed her strong hot body against mine and wriggled until she got comfortable. Her breath smelled like hay.
“Are you still dead?”
I gave a splutter of startled laughter.
“I’ve never been dead.”
“You didn’t die?”
“No. I didn’t die, my darling. I’m here. Go to sleep now.”
And Poppy did sleep until five in the morning, when a gray light was showing round the edges of the curtains, and then she woke with such a violent jerk that it woke me too. Her eyes were wide open and she stared at me as if I were a stranger.
“Jason, sorry to call like this, but I just wanted to know if anything happened over the weekend. Anything that might have disturbed or distressed Poppy.”
I was downstairs in the conservatory—a room of glass and steel girders, and the reason I had bought this flat in the first place, in spite of its poky bedrooms and the miniature kitchen off to its side—speaking softly into the phone in case Poppy overheard. In the garden, there were two goldfinches on the feeder.
“It’s not even half past six.”
“I thought you’d be up. You always get up early.”
“Nothing happened. Nothing disturbed her. She’s fine. You shouldn’t worry over every little thing.”
“This isn’t a little thing. She’s acting strangely. And she wet her bed.”
“She’s just a kid, Tess.”
I thought of the drawing, the words she had said. I thought of the way she had clung to me.
“It doesn’t feel right.”
“I’ve got to go.”
“Right,” I said tiredly. “I mean you’re right. I’m sorry. I do worry.”
I fed Sunny and emptied the dishwasher. I put clothes on Poppy (the stripy cotton trousers that I’d made for her a few weeks ago, a baggy tee shirt, her denim jacket and green pull-on sneakers), and clothes on myself (rusty-colored shirt dress, denim jacket, ankle boots). I brushed Poppy’s red hair and plaited it and Poppy yelled. I brushed my own not-quite-so-red hair and tied it back. I made us both porridge. I put Poppy’s lunch (sandwich, slices of raw carrot and cucumber, apple) into her lunch box and my own lunch (ditto) into mine. I cleaned Poppy’s teeth and cleaned my own. Just before leaving, I put the drawing into my backpack.
At a quarter to eight, I dropped Poppy off at Gina’s house. I’d known Gina since secondary school: we’d gone on holiday together, shared a house, shared secrets; we’d seen each other fall in love, go through breakups, get spectacularly drunk or stoned; we’d argued and made up. For a while, Carlie had been part of our small friendship group as well, until she went off with my boyfriend—and then Gina had refused to have anything more to do with her and still spoke of her with an icy contempt. Gina and I had been pregnant at the same time and given birth a couple of months apart.
I sometimes thought we were more like sisters than friends, bound together by a shared past. She was part of the reason I’d moved to London Fields. Her son Jake was in the same nursery class as Poppy. She had another child too, six-month-old Nellie, with chunky legs, cheeks like red apples and a roar like a motorbike accelerating.
Gina worked for a charity and she had returned to work three months after giving birth. It was her husband, Laurie, who worked from home and did most of the childcare. Sometimes I wondered if he actually worked at all. He genuinely seemed to love looking after the children: he was always baking with them, or painting, or going on outings to strange events he’d read about online. Poppy and I had accompanied him to a surreal rabbit gymkhana in Barking a few months ago and watched solemn teenaged girls tow their bewildered rabbits on leads over, and mostly through, miniature jumps. He was a slight figure, but I was used to seeing him with Nellie in a sling and Jake on his hip. Three times a week, he or Gina—but almost always he—took Poppy and Jake to school and collected them. Twice a week, on my days off, I did the same in return. While Jason had sailed upwards into his headship, I’d shifted sideways after Poppy was born, becoming a part-time primary school teacher on a salary that sometimes covered my outgoings and sometimes didn’t quite cover them. How had that happened, I wondered, when we’d started out as equals? How had I let it happen?
That morning, Poppy didn’t want to be left. She put her arms around my legs and hung on furiously. I had to pry her off me.
“Don’t worry.” Laurie gave me a little push out of the door. “She’ll be fine as soon as you’re out of sight.”
“Something’s wrong,” I said to Nadine as we ate our sandwiches together. Nadine was head of inclusion in the school in East London where I taught Year Threes. She was tall and strong and had dark, very short hair. She wore hooped earrings and leather jackets and biker boots. She had three sons and whenever I went to her house I was struck by the amount of noise and mess they made, and by how calm she remained, like she was in a space of her own. The children at the school were quite scared of her. I loved her, and I wanted to be more like her—solid, confident, safe, married.
I took the drawing out of my backpack.
“She’s never done anything like it before.”
I told Nadine about what Poppy had said, about her wetting the bed, about her clinginess. Nadine listened attentively and then smiled.
“It’s one drawing, one accident in the bed. Do you think that you might just be hyper-vigilant at the moment, because of everything you’ve been through with the divorce?”
“It wasn’t actually a divorce.”
“It was like a divorce. It was a crisis in your life and in hers. So one little thing triggers anxiety in you.”
“What about ‘he did kill’?”
She laughed.
“You should hear some of the stuff my boys come out with. They take everything in, things you didn’t even notice they’d heard or seen. Something someone said on the street as they were passing by, something on TV, whatever.”
I stood up.
“I’m sure you’re right.”
“If you go on feeling worried, you can always talk to Alex.”
Alex was Nadine’s partner and a psychotherapist.
“He wouldn’t mind?”
“You can ask him.”
“It’s OK. I’ll just keep an eye on her.”
When I collected her from Gina and Laurie’s, Poppy was bright-eyed and excited, with yellow paint smeared on one cheek and grass in her hair. She hurled herself into my arms and then pulled away to show me the stickers she’d put on her tummy.
“It looks like she’s had a lovely time.”
Laurie looked distracted.
“I think so. Yes.”
“Was everything all right?”
“They had a little tiff. I’m sure it’s all sorted now.”
I put Poppy down and spoke to Laurie in a quieter tone. As a teacher, I’d always tried to deal with bullying wherever I saw it. I had always promised myself that I would never be one of those parents who refused to accept that their own children could do things like that.
“What happened?”
“Jake got a bit upset.”
“Did Poppy hurt him?”
“I don’t know. Jake was crying. I think Poppy said something.”
“What did she say?”
“I don’t know what it was exactly.” Laurie gave a little shrug and smiled at her, a dimple in one cheek. “Jake just said it was something horrible. He was crying.”
“Could I ask Jake about it?”
Laurie shook his head. “I’ve only just calmed him down. Don’t worry. He’s probably already forgotten about it. We both know what they’re like at that age.”
On the short walk back, I tried to let things be but I couldn’t. When we got to the little patch of green near the flat, I stopped and knelt down so that I could look Poppy right in the eyes.
“Did you have fun with Jake?”
“He cried,” Poppy said, matter-of-factly.
“Yes, I know. Why did he cry?”
“He was crying.”
“Did you say something to make him cry?”
“I’m hungry,” said Poppy. “Very hungry.”
There was no point in pursuing it.
“That’s good,” I said, “because we’re going to have a barbecue with Aidan. That’ll be fun, won’t it?”
I was being ridiculous, I thought. I was being just the kind of overprotective mother I promised myself I wouldn’t be.
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