PoppyHarp Quotes

“But then that evening on the couch Malcolm
said something he didn’t catch. Oliver had leaned
forward and asked what he’d said, and Malcolm had
kissed him. A speculative kiss; nothing more, nothing less. Oliver could smell that dizzying aftershave of Malcolm’s mixed with the musk of a day in a hot office and a night at a party in Kensington. Sweat and tobacco and alcohol.
“I don’t know how to do any of this,” Oliver
whispered. He pressed his forehead to Malcolm’s and closed his eyes. All he could see was Jenny, there in the house with Imogen at her side. Manic, when he’d left her this morning. Baking pies and organising their receipts and bills into boxes so they could find everything when they needed them. She wouldn’t meet his eyes, wouldn’t acknowledge his readiness to leave. Imogen hadn’t kissed him goodbye. His daughter, once so full of life, with so many questions and an endless thirst for adventure, had grown quiet and deeply suspicious of his absences too; she simply avoided interaction with him as much as she could now, which upset him more than anything else. He could accept Jenny’s coldness, he had earned that, but Imogen? He couldn’t abide the thought of alienating his only child. He wanted to sit her down and explain what was going on in his life, in her life. But how could she begin to understand what was happening
when he barely grasped it himself? That closeness
they’d had on their little tour of the children’s homes
seemed so very long ago now.
“Just let yourself go, Oliver,” Malcolm said. “Abandon yourself. Forget about everything else. Just for tonight.”
Oliver kissed him back finally and raised a hand to
Malcolm’s face. After a moment’s hesitation, he ran
his fingers through Malcolm’s fine blond hair. He’d
wanted to do that for weeks. To touch him. One touch led to another until their hands were entwined and they were kissing in the darkness with the sound of London traffic drifting into the apartment. One door being opened that led to another door, and another, deeper into a house he didn’t know the dimensions of. But Malcolm coaxed him through with gentle encouragement. It felt like a controlled explosion in his life. Over the next few days and weeks, he came to realise that there were shards of that explosion in everything. Some of them shone like diamonds, some of them were sharp to the touch. He tried to conceal them as well as he could.”
― Simon Avery, PoppyHarp

“I keep having dreams about a lad I met back when
I was seventeen,” Bliss was saying. “Perfectly innocent afternoon in its way. One of those endless summers. You never remember it raining in your past, do you? Just summers. We collected blackberries. Then we sat on the beach and talked. He took his shirt off. I kept mine on. I was too ashamed of my body to do the same. He was beautiful. So piss-elegant in his way. All cheek-bones and wrists. Tanned hairless skin. I wanted
to be the centre of his world forever.” Bliss smiled, his eyes somewhere in the distance, away from the heat of all these people and their mindless chatter. “It was just a kiss. That was all it was. A sweet, sweet kiss… I never saw him again, even though I went back to that place every afternoon for a week.” His eyes refocused and he glanced at Malcolm, at Oliver. His face was hard, his voice brittle. “I found out he’d been hit by a postal van not two hours after we’d kissed. Died later that night in hospital. I overheard my mother talking about it. She said his name and I had to run away to the beach. I wept for hours. All gone, gone, gone.”
― Simon Avery, PoppyHarp

“Sometimes you get distracted and you look away
from something that’s always been there. And by the time you look again, it’s become a memory.”
― Simon Avery, PoppyHarp