The Woman Who Went to Bed for a Year (32 page)

She shouted, ‘Mum!’

After a moment, she heard the kitchen door open, and
footsteps in the hall.

Her mother’s voice reached her, complaining about
the stairs. ‘These bleddy things will be the death of me.’ She staggered into
Eva’s room and sat down heavily on the soup chair. Why don’t you get a stair
lift?’ she panted. ‘I can’t go on doing this five or six times a day.’

Eva asked, ‘Who’s downstairs?’

‘Derek Plimsoll and a lesbian.’

Eva looked blank.

‘Derek Plimsoll.
You
know the one. He’s on the telly.
East Midlands Tonight.
He makes a joke
and taps his papers together at the end.’

Eva nodded.

Well, it’s him, and a lesbian. I’ve just done an
interview with them.’ She touched the clip-on microphone.

Eva said, ‘Have you won the accumulator on the
Bingo?’

‘No, it’s about you.’

‘Me!’ said Eva.

‘Yes, you,’ said Ruby. ‘Derek Plimsoll reads the
Mercury
like everybody else in the country. He wants to interview you for what
Derek calls “an extended slot”.’

Eva stood up in her bed and stamped up and down on
the mattress. She shouted, ‘Absolutely not! I’d rather eat my own vomit! Go
downstairs and tell them I decline.’

Ruby said, ‘And the magic word?’

Eva yelled, ‘Please!’

Ruby was not used to Eva shouting at her. She said,
tearfully, ‘I thought you’d be happy. It’s
television,
Eva. It means you’re
special. I can’t go down there and tell him you won’t do it. He’ll be
disappointed, heartbroken even.

‘He’ll cope,’ said Eva.

Ruby dragged herself out of the chair, muttering,
and began her descent.

Once
Ruby was back in the kitchen, she told Derek, in a loud whisper, ‘She says no,
she’s in decline, and she’d sooner eat her own sick.’ She said to Jo, We had a
dog that did that … disgusting! I was glad when it died.’

Derek’s smile slipped. ‘Ruby, I can’t leave this
house without interviewing Eva. I am an extremely experienced and respected
journalist. I have my professional pride. So, madam, would you please be so
kind as to go back upstairs and stress to your daughter that I have interviewed
every celebrity to set foot in the East Midlands. I have shadow-boxed with
Muhammad Ali. I have asked Mr Nelson Mandela some penetrating questions about
his terrorist past and, may God rest her soul, I have flirted with Princess
Diana.’ He bent down and whispered in Ruby’s ear, ‘And, by God, did she flirt
back at me. I sensed that, had she been alone without her hangers-on, we could
have had a few drinks and … well, who knows what might have happened? I was
game for it, she was game for it …’ His voice tailed off, and he gave Ruby a
salacious wink.

Ruby was a thrilled co-conspirator. She nodded and
turned.

Eva
was waiting impatiently for the sounds of departure but could hear only her
mother, talking to the staircase, saying, ‘It’s all right for you, staircase,
all you have to do is stand there, it’s me that has to climb you. Yes, I know
you’re creaking, but at least you’re made of wood. When
I
creak, it’s my
poor bones you’re hearing, and it’s painful.’

Eva was not surprised by this.

Her mother had always talked to household objects.
Eva had heard her only yesterday, saying, ‘Come on now, iron, don’t run out of
steam, I’ve got three of Eva’s nighties to do yet.’

Ruby leaned against the door jamb, trying to get her
breath back.

Eva stood on the bed, glaring down at her mother. ‘Well?’
she said. ‘Why haven’t they gone?’

Ruby hissed, ‘You can’t say
no
to Derek
Plimsoll. He interviewed Princess Diana, when she was alive.’

Jo
was watching Ruby’s interview on the camera screen. The fuchsia lipstick made
her look as though she was haemorrhaging from the mouth.

Ruby was saying, ‘Eva’s always been a bit strange.
We thought she was retarded for years, doolally. She used to make up plays in
the back garden, using the rabbit in a non-speaking part. They’d practise all
day, then I’d have to go out and watch. I’d take some knitting to pass the
time. The rabbit was rubbish.’

Jo told Derek, ‘We can’t use any of Ruby’s long
shots. She had her legs open, you can see her big knickers.’

Jo was fed up. Her love of cinéma-vérité was the reason
she’d studied film at Goldsmith’s, but she’d hoped to work with Mike Leigh and
improvising professional actors, not the general public. They were hopelessly
inarticulate and usually fell back on familiar phrases, such as ‘It was a
nightmare’, ‘We were devastated’, ‘It hasn’t sunk in yet’ and — the old
favourite — ‘I’m over the moon’.

Five minutes later, when Eva still hadn’t come down,
Derek said, ‘I’ve had enough of all this fart-arsing about, I’m going up.
Follow me!’

He was slightly unnerved by the prospect of what was
upstairs. He’d had a few nasty surprises in the past, like the 103-year-old man
who, when Derek asked for the secret of his longevity, shouted, on a live
interview Wanking!’ He whistled the theme from
The Exorcist
as he slowly
climbed the stairs.

Jo said, ‘We’re skating on thin ice here, Derek,’ as
she followed him up, filming as she went.

When Derek reached the landing, he hissed at Ruby, ‘Get
out of the way, you’re blocking the shot!’ then pushed by her, making her
stagger a little.

Jo said, ‘A nice shot of you pushing an old lady
aside there, Derek.’

Eva
saw Derek Plimsoll and a woman with a camera on her shoulder coming through the
door towards her. She shouted, ‘Don’t let them in, Mum! Close the door!’

Ruby didn’t know what to do. Jo was also conflicted;
she didn’t like the way this was going. The lovely woman she saw through her
lens was obviously terrified, but Jo was surprised by the starkness of the
white room. The light was beautiful. She could not turn her camera off, so she
adjusted the white balance, and carried on filming.

Eva scrambled under the duvet and shouted, ‘Mum!
Mum! Phone Alexander! His number’s in the book!’

Jo managed to film a couple of seconds of the woman’s
face before she scrambled under the white duvet.

Derek walked into the shot. He announced, ‘I’m in
the bedroom of a woman called Eva Beaver — or, as tens of thousands of people
are now calling her, “The Saint of Suburbia”. I was invited into the house by a
Mrs Brown-Bird, Eva’s mother, but Eva is a shy, nervous woman who has requested
that her face should not be filmed.
East Midlands Tonight
will honour
that plea. She’s there. She’s the lump in the bed.’

Jo’s viewfinder showed a hump under the white duvet.

Eva shouted from under the duvet, ‘Are you still
there, Mum?’

Ruby said, ‘Yes, but I can’t tackle them stairs for
a bit.’

She plumped herself down in the soup chair. ‘I’ve
been up and down like a bleddy pogo stick. I’m seventy-nine. I’m too old for
this carry-on. I’ve got a cake downstairs I’m neglecting.’

Derek shouted, ‘Mrs Brown-Bird, we’re trying to film
here! Please do not talk, whistle or sing.’

Ruby got out of the chair and said, ‘I’m not staying
here, if I’m not wanted.’

She staggered to the banisters on the landing and
leaned heavily against them until she felt able to go downstairs to the
kitchen, where she began to look for Eva’s phone book. Alexander’s name was the
first number in it, in his own handwriting. Ruby sat down at the kitchen table
and laboriously pressed buttons on the phone.

He answered immediately, saying, ‘Eva?’

‘No, Ruby. She wants you to come round. There’s some
television people here and she wants them gone.’

‘What? She wants a bouncer?’

‘Yes, she wants you to come and chuck them out of
the house,’ said Ruby, expanding on Eva’s instructions.

‘Why choose me? I’m not a street-fighting man.’

Ruby said, ‘Yes, but people are more frightened of
black men, aren’t they?’

Alexander laughed down the phone. ‘OK, I’ll be there
in five minutes. I’ll bring my deadly paintbrushes, shall I?’

Ruby said, ‘Good, because I’m fed up with all this
argy-bargy. I’m going home.’

She placed the phone carefully in its charger, put
on her hat and coat, took her shopping bag from the back of the kitchen door
and went out into the cold afternoon.

Eva
had persuaded Jo to switch the camera off and was sitting up in bed with her
arms folded, looking — in Derek’s eyes — like a modern Joan of Arc.

Derek said, ‘Now, are you going to be sensible, and
give me a face-to-face interview in your own words, or do I have to speak on
your behalf? If so, you may not like what I have to say.’

‘This is what I’ve got to say. Fuck off out of my
house!’

‘I’m not happy with this,’ Jo said. ‘You’re bullying
her, Derek, and I may have to inform Human Resources.’

Derek said, ‘It’s OK, we can lose anything you’re
not happy about in the edit.’

‘But I’m not involved in the edit. All I’m allowed
to do is point a camera.

‘You weren’t so high-minded when we doorstepped that
grieving widow last week.’

‘Which one? There were two grieving widows last
week.’

‘The one whose idiot husband fell into the
industrial bread mixer.’

‘I wasn’t happy.’

Derek grabbed Jo by the shoulders and said, ‘But
that was such an artistic end shot you took — the tears running down her face,
that kind of rainbow effect you got.’

Jo said, ‘I shot her tears through a crystal vase. I’m
not proud of it. I’m ashamed.’

‘We’re all ashamed in television, deary, but it
doesn’t stop us doing it. Never forget, we give the public what they
want.’

Derek dropped his voice and murmured to Eva, ‘By the
way, can I say how sorry I am that your husband’s about to leave you? You’re
probably devastated, aren’t you?’

Eva said, ‘Do you know the meaning of the word “devastated”?’
She didn’t wait for him to answer. ‘It means, “destroyed or ruined, shattered
into a thousand pieces”. But here I am, sitting up in bed, in one piece. Now,
please close the door behind you.’

As he stamped down the stairs, Derek said, ‘This is
why I loathe working with women. They can’t think further than their fanny.’
In a falsetto voice that was meant to be female, he said, ‘Oh dear me, I’m
getting emotional and my hormones are taking over and everything must be
ethical and from a woman’s point of view!’

They heard a key turn in the lock, and Alexander
walked in carrying a large framed painting covered in bubble wrap.

‘Is it you who’s bothering Eva?’ he asked.

Derek said, ‘Are you the Alexander Mrs Brown-Bird’s
been telling us about? Friend of the family, eh?’

Alexander said, firmly, ‘Please leave immediately,
nobody wants you here.’

‘Look, sunshine, this is a big story in our neck of
the woods. It’s not every day we find a saint in suburbia. We’ve got close-up
shots of her in the window, we’ve got an interview with the mother, and Barry
Wooton has told us his very boring, but very tragic story. All we need is Eva.
Just a few words.’

Alexander gave a broad smile, reminding Plimsoll of
the pregnant crocodile they’d recently filmed in Twycross Zoo.

‘You interviewed me at the opening of my first exhibition,’
he said. ‘I think I know your introduction by heart. “This is Alexander Tate,
he’s a painter, not of the ghetto, not portraits of gang members, not edgy
depictions of urban decay. No, Alexander paints watercolours of the English
countryside …” Then cue the harpsichord music.’

Derek said, ‘I thought it was a nice little piece.’

Jo said, ‘Derek, you were patronising Alexander, and
implying that painting watercolours was an unusual activity for black people.’

Derek said, ‘It is.’

Jo turned to Alexander. ‘My life partner is black.
Do you know her — Priscilla Robinson?’

Alexander said, ‘No, funny that. I really ought to
know the ten thousand black folk toiling in Leicester’s cotton fields.’

‘Don’t lay that shit at
my
door, Uncle Tom!’
Jo said, angrily.

Derek Plimsoll sat down heavily on the stairs and
said, ‘This is the last time I do house calls. In future, everybody comes to me
in the studio.’

Alexander looked down at Derek’s hairline. The white
roots would need touching up soon, he thought. It was pitiful.

48

Eva
watched Derek and Jo walk to the Mercedes van in silence. She kept watching
until Jo had driven the van out of sight.