Flying Under Bridges (31 page)

20
January

Holloway
Prison for Women

 London

Dear Inge,

Bypassing
Eden ford

… when
you give alms, sound no trumpet before you…

(MATTHEW
6.2)

I can’t tell you how wonderful
it is to hear that Shirley has started talking to you. It sounds like you need
it too. Adam won’t discuss anything when he visits. Not that he was able to
before. I remember one Tuesday evening when I’d got back from one of the women’s
meetings. I was sitting having coffee when Adam sidled into the kitchen. He had
the same look that Tom used to have when he’d just eaten something from the
coal bucket. Naughty but thrilled.

‘Eve, I’ve
been thinking.’

‘Mmm,’
I replied, thinking that thinking was overrated.

‘I’ve
been thinking about Shirley,’ Adam confided.

‘She’s
fine. She’s having dinner with John.’

‘Yes.
Not that Shirley. Not daughter Shirley. My Shirley. My song.

‘Shirley
Bassey. Right.’

‘Eve,
you know how much I admire Shirley and I want this to be “fun”, like Horace
said, but I don’t want anyone to think it’s not a serious tribute.’ I nodded.
Well, what was there to say? ‘So I think I’ve decided that I really can’t give
the full flavour of Shirley unless I actually dress up as her.’ I stopped my reverie
on root vegetables and looked at my husband. He was quite flushed and as
excited as I had ever seen him.

‘The
thing is, I would need your help. There are things I don’t know. I mean,
sequins of course, but what sort of dress, and where would we get it? Shoes, I
think, might be tricky, but apparently there are shops where . .

Once
Adam had broached the subject of dressing up he couldn’t stop himself. Over
lunch we had endless detailed conversation about the denier of stockings and
whether Shirley generally favours a pearl nail varnish or plain. We hadn’t
talked so much in years. Odd that the sort of conversation I thought I might
one day have with my daughter, I was having with my husband. Adam was glowing
as he polished off the parsnips.

‘I
haven’t told the committee about it. It’s going to be a surprise. I wonder if
I should write and tell Shirley herself? As a tribute. You know how much I love
her. We named our daughter after her.’

We had
also named our son after Tom Jones but I didn’t see Adam practising his hip
swivels and stuffing socks down his crotch. That night he sat on the bed with
his hands protecting his lap. The bedroom looked quite different now. Adam had
stopped growing his avocado plants on the windowsill. The avocado plant which I
had tried to sellotape back to life had died. Adam had been very upset.

‘Eve,’
he demanded one morning as he stood before his felled vegetation. ‘How could
this possibly have happened?’ It was a tone of voice that ‘will be obeyed’, so
I told him.

‘Let’s
see … oh yes, I had just had a rather tense encounter with Simon the postman
when a projectile speculum shot out of my vagina and shredded the plant with a
single blow from forty feet away. I tell you, if I could serve like that at
tennis we’d be champions at the club.’

He gave
me one of his looks and never mentioned it again. Without saying a word, he
moved all the plants from the bedroom and filled up the little porch off the
kitchen with them instead. I think he was too embarrassed to ask what a
speculum was. He hates not to know anything, and he didn’t know. I left it
lying casually on the coffee table on top of his copy of
Security Monthly
for
ages and he never so much as commented. Somehow the plant death seemed to make
Adam determined to take more charge in the house.

‘Eve,’
he said, while I was sorting the laundry, ‘I have made a decision. I don’t
think we should have the
Guardian
delivered any more.

‘We
could get a different paper,’ I said, counting out his socks. ‘No, it’s not the
paper. It’s the principle. I don’t think it’s helpful having all that foreign
news flooding into the house. I think it upsets you and I don’t want to pay for
it any more.’

I stood
looking out of the window with his clean underpants in my hand. That was when I
realised. I didn’t have any money. I’d never had any money. It was not mine. It
was Adam’s. It was all Adam’s. It had always been Adam’s. I couldn’t do
anything unless he said. That night I couldn’t sleep. I stood in my kitchen in
the dark, looking up to the woods behind the town.

The
next day the women’s group were up amongst the protesters. They brought food
and blankets. They made some very nice signs in support of the woods, clean air
and plants in general.

The
general consensus at the Centurion Club was that the women’s study class had to
be stopped. Not just the protest. They had to be stopped from meeting at all.

‘It’s
causing a division in the town between some of the men and their wives,’ Adam
explained when he asked me to stop letting the women use Mother’s house. ‘The
men feel they are getting blamed for things that are not their fault. The
people of Edenford need to work together.’

‘And,’
I added, ‘the men are not getting a hot supper on Tuesdays.’

‘That
doesn’t help,’ agreed my husband, surprised by my understanding. ‘By the way,’
he said, ‘I shan’t be in tonight. It’s my turn for escort duty.’

‘What?’
I swear we were speaking different languages by then.

‘Escort
duty! I told you! The Centurions are offering escorts to young women out for
the evening. Making sure they get home all right. It was—’

‘John’s
idea,’ I sighed.

He was
everywhere. John was niggling away at every inch of our lives.

Adam
had gone out on escort service when I got word from Tom that the contractors
and the police were about to make their move. I called Theresa to gather the
women but she wasn’t home. None of them was home. I ran to get you, and Patrick
was there and we ran, all of us, even Kate, up to the woods. Remember? All you
could hear was those huge diggers and tractors moving forward. The headlights
swinging into the woods and my Tom standing there in front of his tent, not
moving. Nobody came to help and we weren’t enough. The earth-movers just
ploughed forward. It was as if they didn’t see that anything was in their way.
They wrecked everything — the bluebells, the trees and then Tom’s tent. This
two-ton machine just ploughed through the tent and it was so surreal. All Tom’s
animals flew in the air as the canvas ripped and shredded round the marching
machine. Death flew about and we could do nothing. It was Patrick who found the
box with the dead ducklings inside. They had been completely crushed. He stood
there crying and Tom put his arm round him and he was crying too. And no one
came to help and the man in charge said to me, ‘It’s progress, Mrs Marshall,
you can’t stand in the way of progress.’ And he had legal papers to make it all
right. Legal papers from Hogart, Hoddle and Hooper.

Tom
came home with me and he was desperate. Sobbing like a little boy, but I couldn’t
help him. I couldn’t make it all right. He went to his old room and wouldn’t
come out. I wanted to help him but I was scared. My son was broken and I couldn’t
mend him. I couldn’t care for one more person and make their life whole again.
I just didn’t have it in me. I was so sad for my son and so terrified that I
was supposed to look after him. I felt like I was choking. Drowning. Theresa
Baker finally called at about ten when she got my message. She had been out to
dinner. All the members of the Centurion Club had taken their wives out to
dinner. Odd that they had picked that one night. And I was angry and I got
angrier. You know. You were there. Kate was there. Tell Shirley. Tell her what
happened. Then the phone went again and it was the police. Adam had been
arrested.

I don’t
know if Shirley ever understood about that either. He had been on escort duty,
waiting at the pub for any woman to phone for help but no one had. Anyway, come
closing time he felt he hadn’t really done anything. He’s a good chap so he
started to walk home but he was looking out for women on their own. Well, you
know he’s had this trouble with his.., bits, so he was holding himself as he
walked. There was nothing to it but he went up to this woman waiting at the bus
stop. Anyway, it was a complete chance thing. She turned out to be a friend of
Theresa Baker’s. She’d seen all Adam’s leaflets and it had made her rather
wary. None of this was helped by the fact that Adam did have his hand on his
trousers. She was very tense so when he came near she screamed, kicked him in
the groin and called to a police car that happened to be passing.

The
police cleared it all up, but it caused talk. You know what people are like,
saying there’s no smoke without fire. When I went to collect him he could
hardly look up.

‘Oh
God, Eve, what will people say? What will they say?’

And I
think about that. I think maybe I stopped caring what people would say.

Love,
Eve

PS I
found this for you and I really like it.

Behold, I am toward God as you are:

I too was formed from a piece of clay.

(JOB
33.6)

Funny
that it’s giving me some comfort.

Fact
—
220,000 gay people were killed in the German concentration
camps of the Second World War. It was the second largest group after the Jews.
When the war was over all survivors of the concentration camps were treated
generously and given reparations. Everyone except the homosexuals. They were
told that they were ineligible for compensation as they were still technically ‘criminals’
under German law. Fearing further discrimination the survivors found they had
to keep their identity secret so none were able to protest publicly.

I didn’t
know.

Chapter
Twenty

The morning after the
death of Bluebell Wood and Adam’s arrest, neither father nor son emerged from
their rooms. The
Daily Mail
kept phoning to speak to Adam until Eve had
to take the phone off the hook. She found herself alone downstairs with no idea
how to heal the hurts in the house. She had nothing to occupy her but chores
and more chores. She took the newspapers out to the recycling box in the
garage. Adam’s election posters and paints were all over the floor. He had
spent weeks of his life on this so he could call himself ‘councillor’ and tell
everyone about family life, and now, perhaps, it was ruined.

Eve
stood looking at his campaign materials and in that moment she made up her
mind. She would never work at Susan Lithgood’s again. She didn’t like cats. Snooty
creatures. Eve spoke out loud to the empty room, ‘You can’t imagine them
starting a shop for us if we were in trouble, can you?’

However
much the women of the community were behind the Cats Protection League, Eve
knew she wasn’t about to sort other people’s smelly old clothes to sell for ten
pence to buy KiteKat for stray animals who’d savage a bit out of your leg as
soon as thank you. Eve opened a great tin of red paint. If Susan Lithgood could
start her own charity then so could she. Eve Marshall’s Mission to the Children
was on its way and it was partly the mission that drove Eve to Shirley’s
church.

The
Church of the Ten Commandments was very modern, very Scandinavian. It looked
like a religious franchise in William’s shopping mall. It was very large with
banked seating in a three-quarter circle rising high above a central stage of
light wood. The place was packed. There must have been several hundred people
there when Eve went. She wore her blue dress because it was church and it was
Sunday, but she stuck with the trainers. She really liked her trainers and was
less and less interested in what anyone else thought. Eve stood outside waiting
to go in. A very modem sculpture dominated the front entrance. It was made of
white stone and showed Jesus smiling and holding out his arms to a small group
of children. It should have been lovely but it had a slightly sinister look to
it. In defence against the ever-present pigeon population of Edenford, the
church elders had had the sculpture made bird-proof. Three-inch spikes of clear
plastic stood in relief over the entire edifice. They stuck out from the top of
Jesus’s head and his hands, from the clothes and shoulders of the children.
Suffer the children, thought Eve, especially if they fell on the sculpture.

She was
surprised to see Kate and Inge heading towards the church. Kate leant on Inge’s
arm. She looked pale under her tan and thin, very thin. Eve didn’t say
anything. She hated the idea that people might think she was friends with Inge
because she was famous. Inge had no such inhibitions. Meeting Eve again had
been one of the best things that had happened lately.