Poppy’s question of who was going to wash her nan’s soiled bed linen, sober her mum up enough to collect her benefit and lock the door every night while she was off securing their future? Poppy was smart enough to know that this was her life and there was naff all she could do about it.
Her sunny disposition meant she wasn’t bitter. She did sometimes think about a life with a different kind of luck. A life that had seen her born into a circumstance that allowed her the freedom to study and become whatever she wanted! This was not bitterness; try to find one person on the planet who doesn’t also ponder some aspect of their life, a different choice, a different person, a different career that might have kept their husband safe from harm…
Poppy pulled her knees up under her chin and sat back on the sofa, feeling surprisingly numb. She had expected hysteria or at the very least anger. What she couldn’t have predicted was the anaesthesia that now gripped her. She rubbed the back of her wedding ring with the thumb of the same hand and found herself repeating his name, ‘Mart… Mart…’ She tried to invoke his image with the self-soothing mantra. The room was once again silent, as if the soldiers had never been there.
Is that what it would be like now for Martin? As if he had never been there at all? The flat was now quiet and empty, without the telly on for background noise and without the two men that had filled the small space only a few minutes before. It had been four years since the space had been home to a family; a rather unconventional one, but a family nonetheless. Death and desertion had seen the group eroded, leading up to that moment, when it was just Poppy, alone.
Her mum, Cheryl, had never been cruel, intentionally neglectful or deliberately spiteful. Similarly, she had never been affectionate or proud of her little girl. Never glad to see her or interested to know about her day. Never shared an event with her, told her a secret or cleared her clothes from the end of the sofa so that her child could sit down. Never brushed her daughter’s hair if it was ratty or trimmed her nails so she wouldn’t have to bite them. Whether Poppy was fed or not, whether she was in bed asleep or sitting alongside her mother on the settee at eleven o’clock on a school night with no clean uniform, none of these were important to Cheryl, so they had to be important to Poppy.
Wally, her grandad, was a professional snoozer. His dozing form fascinated Poppy; she wondered what the point of Wally was. He slept all night in his bed and all day in his chair. His skinny frame permanently concertinaed into a snoring ‘z’ shape, a human onomatopoeia. His slumber took precedence over all other household activity; he sat like a queen bee whose activity and lifestyle is supported by all those around her. Wally held court over his kingdom of Somnolence. In this dreary realm, many restrictions were put in place to curb the behaviour of a growing, inquisitive girl: ‘Keep the noise down, Poppy Day, your grandad is sleeping’; or ‘Turn your music off, Poppy Day, your grandad is sleeping’; or ‘Stop hitting the floor with that bloody yo-yo, your grandad is…’
‘Yeah, yeah I know… he’s sleeping!’
Wally’s death was a strange non-event in Poppy’s life; the most memorable consequence being that there was now an empty chair with an indent of his dead arse in it. She felt no sadness at his passing; figuring that Wally must be delighted to be permanently turning up his toes in readiness for the ultimate snooze…
The main difference for Poppy was that now when her mum or nan wanted her to be quiet they said, ‘Turn that bloody racket off, Poppy Day,’ or ‘Keep quiet, Poppy Day!’ In her head she heard, ‘… your grandad is sleeping’ and had to fight the urge to shout out really loudly, ‘Yes! I know he is sleeping, but my yo-yo banging sure as hell isn’t going to wake him up now!’
Poppy’s nan, Dorothea, had always been slightly nuts. She watched the tumble dryer instead of the telly, and made jelly with peas in it instead of fruit because it looked nicer; as opposed to now when she was completely crazy, proper full-blown bonkers.
Poppy lived with her mum and Nan in