The Woman Who Went to Bed for a Year (15 page)

The house was dead now that Eva had gone.

22

Brianne
was sitting on her narrow bed, staring at the wall opposite. Alexander had left
half an hour earlier, leaving the bookcase and the jewellery, but unwittingly
taking Brianne’s previously unused heart with him. She was filled with the most
amazing joy.

She said out loud, ‘I love him.’

She wished now that she had bothered to make some
friends. She wanted to ring somebody and tell them her good news. Brian Junior
would not be interested, Poppy would turn news to her advantage and her mother
had gone mad. There was only
him
she could tell.

She picked up his business card and reached for her
mobile. He answered immediately and illegally — he was doing 75 mph and was in
the middle lane of the M1, going South.

White Van Man.’

‘Alexander?’

‘Brianne?’

‘Yes, I forgot to thank you for bringing Mum’s stuff
up. It was very kind of you.’

‘It wasn’t kindness. It was work, Brianne. I’ll get
paid for it.’

Where are you?’

‘I’ve just turned on to the motorway. I’m trapped between
two lorries. If the front one brakes, I’m mincemeat.’

Brianne exclaimed, ‘Alexander, you must turn the
phone off at once!’

She could imagine his mangled body on the motorway,
surrounded by emergency vehicles. She could clearly see a helicopter hovering
above him, waiting to take him to a specialist unit somewhere.

She said, ‘You will take care of yourself, won’t
you? Your life is precious.’

He did as she had asked and switched his phone off.
He didn’t know the girl had such strong feelings — she had shown very little
emotion when he had handed over her mother’s jewellery.

Brianne
went outside and walked briskly up and down in front of the accommodation
block. It was a cold night and she was not dressed for the outdoors, but she
didn’t care. The possibility of love had softened her face and straightened her
back.

How could she have lived so long without knowing of
his existence?

All that love stuff that she had once despised: the
hearts, the songs, moon/June, the flowers. She
wanted
him to give her a
white teddy bear clutching a plastic rose. Before today she could take men or
leave them, most of them were spoilt man-boys. But he — he was worthy of
worship.

He looked like a black prince.

She had never allowed a man to touch her breasts, or
what she called her private bits. But as she paced in the cold she could feel
her body melting, dissolving. She yearned for him. She was incomplete without
him.

Poppy
looked out of her window and was astonished to see Brianne walking up and down
in her pyjamas, her breath visible, like ectoplasm. She rapped on the window
and saw Brianne look up, wave and smile. Poppy wondered which drug she had been
taking. She threw on the red silk kimono she had shoplifted from Debenhams,
and hurried downstairs.

23

It
was the day before Guy Fawkes Night, but some premature fireworks were being
let off as Brian and Titania joined a hastily convened staff meeting at the
National Space Centre.

Titania’s husband, Guy Noble, known as ‘Gorilla’ to
his friends, had written to Professor Brady complaining that his wife was
having ‘a torrid sexual affair at work with that buffoon Dr Brian Beaver’.
Titania had confessed to having sex in the Clean Room, which housed the next
generation of moon probe. It was called
Walkers on the Moon,
after
their main sponsor, a local crisp manufacturer.

All the staff were in the meeting, including the
cleaners, the maintenance crew and the groundsman. It was part of Professor
Brady’s (aka Leather Trousers) management philosophy that his team be ‘inclusive’.
They were seated in the planetarium, which added an epic universal edge to
their discussion.

Leather Trousers said, ‘I don’t care who you shag,
Dr Beaver. The issue is that you chose to do it in the Clean Room. You could
have polluted the atmosphere, corrupted the instrumentation and jeopardised
the whole project. And ultimately defiled the surface of the moon.’

Brian asked defiantly, ‘Well,
have
we?’

Leather Trousers admitted, ‘No, the readings are
clean. But it has taken thirty-six man and woman hours to verify — time we do
not have. We are already behind schedule.’

Titania, who was hiding behind a long fringe of red
hair, put her hand up and said, ‘Can I just say, in my own defence, that the
sex was indeed “torrid”? But the danger was minimised — we were both wearing
steriles, and it was all over in ninety seconds.’

Their colleagues laughed and looked at Brian.

Various veins throbbed in his head and neck.

He was quick to retaliate. ‘It was nothing but a
quick leg-over.’ He looked around, hoping the company would find this amusing.

There was a sharp intake of breath, and one of the
cleaners squeezed Titania’s hand.

Brian continued, not realising that he had
volunteered to dig his own grave, “‘Turgid” would better describe our affair
these days.’

One of the clerical staff rushed towards the door
with a handkerchief pressed to her face.

Leather Trousers said, ‘C’mon, guys, let’s cool it,
we’re all professionals, yeah? Even the cleaners, right?’ He smiled at the
group of cleaners to show that he valued them and their work.

Titania sobbed. ‘Sex with the Gorilla went on a bit,
but once he’d stumbled over my clitoris we both had good times.’

There was an appalled silence, and the cleaner withdrew
her hand from Titania’s.

A technician whispered to his neighbour, ‘I like to
experiment, but I draw the line at bestiality. That sounds bloody dangerous to
me.’

Titania was surprised by Brian’s obvious and public
contempt for her. She arranged her fringe so that it hid the lines on her
forehead, and rummaged through her handbag for the lipstick she thought took
ten years off her face.

She said, in a voice that threatened to crack, ‘Anyway,
Brian, our lovemaking is quite often torrid.’ Turning to the assembled staff,
she confessed, ‘Only last week he was tickling my nipples with his wife’s
hairbrush, and shouting that I was a dirty whore, and he was going to punish me
by tying me to the large telescope and have Professor Brady take me from the
rear.’

Brian jumped up and shouted, ‘Not from the rear! I
did not say the rear!’

Wayne Tonkin, the groundsman, laughed out loud.

Professor Brady said angrily, ‘Listen, Beaver, do
not include me in your sicko fantasies!’

Titania looked around the meeting and said, ‘He’s
used you all at some time.’

Some of Brian’s colleagues were repulsed by this
revelation, but most were secretly pleased.

Professor Brady was in a dilemma. Could he suspend
or otherwise discipline Dr Beaver for using his colleagues as sexual
stimulants? Did sexual fantasies come under the heading of ‘sexual harassment
in the workplace’? Was there anything in their contracts that implied they had
been abused by Beaver’s thoughts?

Mrs Hordern straightened her overall and said, ‘It’s
his poor wife I feel sorry for. I’ll bet she’s looking everywhere for that
hairbrush.’

Titania said, ‘Don’t waste your time feeling sorry
for Eva Beaver, Mrs Hordern, she’s a mere lump in the bed. She never gets up!
Brian has to cook his own dinner every night.’

Leather Trousers intervened. ‘Look, guys, this is
not helping us to move forward. Our minds should be focused on the upcoming
launch of
Walkers on the Moon.’

Wayne
Tonkin said, ‘And ‘ow many billions of fuckin’ pounds are you spendin’ on
another cack-’anded attempt to ‘it the fuckin’ moon, eh? Ain’t you ‘eard? The
Yanks already done it in 1
969.
And in the meantime I ‘ave to try and
cut the bleedin’ grass with a lawnmower what don’t mow!’

Leather Trousers sometimes regretted his inclusive
policy. This was one such time.

The flight operations engineers — a bolshie, troublesome
group — took the opportunity to continue an earlier technical discussion about
velocity. Phrases like ‘regressive elliptical orbit’ and ‘delta-v budget’ were
hurled across the room.

Leather Trousers tried to shout over them, saying, ‘C’mon
guys!’

But no voice was louder or more vociferous than that
of Wayne Tonkin, who was a Barry White tribute singer in his local pub, the Dog
and Compass. His voice rattled the artificial heavens above their heads.

“Ands up who wants a new, state-of-the-art, sit-on
lawnmower?’

The resolution was carried almost unanimously.

Titania
was the first to leave, together with an escort of sympathetic female staff.
Brian was left on his own in the room.

He was afraid he would lose his job. It had been
rumoured that there were to be involuntary redundancies, and he was
fifty-five, a dangerous age in a young man’s game. Holes were beginning to show
in Brian’s knowledge. He felt that the bandwagon was rolling away from him and
that, however fast he ran now, he would never be able to catch up.

24

Eva
was lying in bed watching the night sky, which was filled with small explosions
of glorious colours and shapes. She could hear a fire engine in the distance
and smell the smoke of countless bonfires. She pitied all the women out there
who were, at this very moment, catering for their families and guests at their
bonfire parties. She thought back to bonfire night 2010, otherwise known as The
Great Disaster. Brian had put up a poster at work which said:

CALLING
ALL BRIGHT SPARKS!

Join
Brian and Eva and celebrate Guy Fawkes’ death!

Catholics
Beware!

Eva had shopped on the morning of the fifth. Brian
had told her to prepare enough food for thirty people, so she had driven to
Morrisons and bought:

60
pork sausages

2
kilos of onions

60
torpedo rolls

35
baking potatoes

a
huge lump of Cheddar cheese

a
slab of Heinz baked beans

30
novelty Guy Fawkes biscuits

a
large bottle of Heinz tomato sauce

3
packs of butter

toffee-apple
ingredients for 30

1 Guy
Fawkes mask and hat

10
livestock-friendly Chinese lanterns

6
bottles
of rosé wine

6
bottles of white wine

6
bottles of red wine

1
barrel of Kronenbourg

2
crates of John Smith’s.

She had hurt her back hefting the Kronenbourg from
the trolley into the boot of the car.

On the way home she had spent almost £200 on two
boxes of assorted fireworks, and sparklers for the children.

The afternoon was taken up dragging a damp mattress
from the garage down the garden and manoeuvring it on to the small bonfire,
constructing an effigy of Guy Fawkes, making toffee apples (including chopping
kindling for toffee-apple sticks), cleaning the downstairs lavatory, vacuuming
the sitting room, deep-cleaning the kitchen, selecting listener-friendly CDs
and jet-washing the patio.

Brian had asked his guests to turn up at six, so Eva
filled the oven with a first sitting of potatoes at five thirty, set out the
cold food and the drinks, rinsed and dried the glassware, placed candles into
windproof lanterns, and waited.

At
seven ten the doorbell finally rang and Eva heard Brian’s voice saying, ‘Mrs
Hordern, lovely to see you. Is this Mr Hordern?’ As he was taking their coats,
he asked, ‘Have you come in a crowd? Are the others parking?’

She said, ‘No, we’ve come on us own.’

When
they’d finally gone, Eva declared, ‘That was the most excruciating night of my
life — and I include in that giving birth to the twins. What happened, Brian?
Do your colleagues hate you that much?’

‘I can’t understand it,’ he replied. ‘Perhaps my
notice fell off the board. I only used one drawing pin.’

‘Yes,’ she said, ‘that’s what must have happened. It
was the drawing pin.’

Later,
as they were sharing a second bottle of burgundy, Brian asked, ‘Did you
notice, when I let off my Beaver Special rockets? Neither of them gave so much
as an “ohhh” or an “ahhh”. They just sat there, filling their stupid faces with
carbohydrates and grease! I spent seven days building those. At great risk to
myself. I mean, I was working with unstable materials. At any moment I could
have blown myself and the sheds to smithereens.’