Free Poppyland by Raffaella Barker Page A

This is a truly disgusting sensation – matted, sweaty fur. God knows why this morning I chose to wear a thin V-neck jumper over the T-shirt next to my skin. It itches like a hair shirt. Anyway, wrenching the goddam clothes off I grab the phone in a strop.
    â€˜Hello? What?’
    It’s Lucy, my sister, five hours ahead in England. She’s a year older than me, and although I like to think of her as my inspiration and my mentor, the truth is that nothing she has done has rubbed off on me, and actually the dynamic between us is more that she glows and I try to shut my eyes to it. When she got married, I was meant to give a speech, but I couldn’t find the words, and I burst into tears. I could not express what she meant to me, or how fabulous she is at all. It was so important and I couldn’t do it. She could have done it for me, that is what I love about her; she will try anything and make a success of it. She could plait her hair and tie her shoelaces when she was five. She did mine too, so I didn’t learn until I was embarrassingly old. I wanted to say that although I try to ignore her loveliness as much as possible, sheis like the sun, and even when my eyes are closed, her golden warmth emanates through my eyelids, permeating my being, and that is what she is like with everyone who comes across her. In the end that was just about what I did say, and she stood up and gave a speech back that I wish I could remember about how she could not have been her without me being me beside her. On her wedding day it was a loving and inclusive thing to do, and that’s Lucy. She is sunny and the world smiles with her. While I love that about her, it is sometimes hard to bear, and so is her unswerving belief that I will soon be experiencing what she is, in the way that she is experiencing it. It is nonsense, we are way too different, but she needs to think of me following the path she cuts through life; it’s too big a deal for her to be doing it just for herself. Just now she sounds tired.
    â€˜Hey, Sis, how are things? I just heard on the news that they’ve closed JFK, your snow looks unreal.’
    â€˜Oh Lucy, hang on a sec, I’m so hot. How are the tiny girls?’ With a gasp, I tuck the phone under my chin and wrench off the next layer, a dark green T-shirt, hurling it down. Even the way it floats to the floor is infuriating.
    â€˜Oh they’re lovely, full on, but they’re asleep now. God, I’m jealous you’re hot.’
    Now I am topless apart from my bra. ‘God, it’s so unhealthy to be living like this. It’s wrecking the planet. We should get back to nature a bit and use fires instead of central heating. Then we wouldn’t find the cold so freakingly COLD!’ I am puffing now,and trying to put a different T-shirt on with the phone cradled somehow on my shoulder.
    Lucy laughs. ‘Yeah, you’re not wrong, we should get used to the weather we have instead of trying to set ourselves up against it.’ She pauses and sighs. ‘But the reality of doing that is hellish, let me tell you. We’ve got no heating in this cottage, and in Norfolk by the sea there’s nothing between us and the North Pole and boy, can you feel it.’ The phone clatters as she chats on, I imagine her tucked up in bed in the wild weather of Norfolk, and it’s sweet, like a children’s story.
    Lucy is still chatting, ‘I seem to find every reason and fantasy not to get used to it – like telling myself this is only an illusion of cold and actually it’s really boiling, or so Mac tells me all the time.’
    â€˜Is it?’ I wonder what the geology lesson is leading towards. ‘What are you on about?’
    â€˜The earth is actually soft centred. It’s molten deep within, you know – but, speaking of boiling, how can you be hot for even a moment? How can you be hot in New York? It feels like the dawning of a new ice