The Woman Who Went to Bed for a Year (33 page)

She quickly laid out the White Pathway. Every time
she took a step on it, she imagined herself walking along the Milky Way, far
beyond the earth and its complications. After peeing and washing her hands,
she reached for her make-up. She wanted to look as good as she could. The
expensive, shiny black pots and brushes she had accumulated over the years were
talismans — the discreet gold logo protected her from harm. She knew she was
being exploited, she could have bought the same contents for a sixth of the
price, but she didn’t care, the overpricing had made her feel edgy and
reckless, as if she were a circus performer about to traverse the high wire
without a safety net.

She sprayed herself with the perfume she had used
since she was a young librarian, and could not afford it. She had been very
taken by the story of Marilyn Monroe who, when asked, What do you wear in bed?’
had replied, ‘Chanel No. 5.’

‘It probably wasn’t true,’ thought Eva now. Nothing
was true for long. In time, everything was deconstructed. Black turned out to
be white. The Crusaders were rapists, looters and torturers. Bing Crosby
thrashed his children. Winston Churchill hired an actor to broadcast some of
his most famous speeches. When Brian had told her all these things, she had
said, ‘But they
should
be true.’ She wanted heroes and heroines in her
life. If not heroes, people to admire and respect.

After making up her face, she returned to bed,
pulled the white sheet up like a drawbridge, folded it carefully and put it
under her pillows. She was proud that she had never once strayed from the White
Pathway in nearly five months. Part of her knew it was a contrivance, but she
felt that if she fell off the pathway and on to the wooden floor, she would
spiral out of control, spinning, following the earth as it journeyed around the
sun.

Halfway
up the stairs, Alexander stopped. He shouted, ‘Is it OK to come up?’

Eva shouted back, ‘Yes.’

When he walked up two more steps, he could see Eva
sitting on her bed. She looked very beautiful. There was flesh on her bones and
the deep hollows in her cheeks had been filled.

He stood at her bedroom door and said, ‘You look
well.’

She said, ‘What’s that under your arm?’

‘It’s a painting, it’s for you. A present. For the
bare wall facing you.’

She said, softly, ‘But I like the bare wall, I like
to watch the light move across it.’

‘I froze my bloody arse off painting this.’

Eva said, ‘I don’t want anything in here that
interferes with my thinking.’

The truth was, she was very frightened that she
might not like his work. She wondered if it were possible to love a man whose
artistry she did not admire? Instead, she said, ‘Did you know that we haven’t
said hello to each other yet?’

‘I don’t need you to say hello to me, you’re always
with me. You never leave.’

‘I don’t know you,’ Eva said, ‘but I think about you
constantly. I can’t take the painting, but I’d love the bubble wrap.’

This wasn’t what Alexander had hoped for. He’d
thought she would be wild about the painting, especially when he pointed to the
tiny figure of Eva on the brow of a hill with her blob of yellow-blonde hair.
He’d seen her flying into his arms. They would kiss, he would cup her breasts,
she would gently stroke his belly. At some stage, they would climb under the
duvet and explore each other’s bodies.

He didn’t expect to find himself sitting on the side
of her bed, popping little transparent mounds in the bubble wrap. He said,
between satisfying pops, ‘You need a gatekeeper. Somebody to decide who’s
allowed in the house and who isn’t.’

‘Like Cerberus,’ she said, ‘the three-headed dog who
guarded the entrance, to the cave where somebody — I can’t remember who —
lived. There was something about a pomegranate and a seed, but no … I can’t
remember.’

There was a timid ringing of the doorbell.

Eva froze.

Alexander said, ‘I’ll go.’

After
he had left, Eva thought hard about the first time she had heard of the dog
Cerberus.

She was in a classroom, rain was battering the long
windows. She was worried because she had forgotten her fountain pen again, and
at any moment the class would be asked to write something down. Mrs Holmes, her
English teacher, was telling thirty-six twelve-year old girls a story.

Eva could smell the teacher’s scent — it was a
mixture of Evening in Paris and Vicks vapour rub.

Alexander
reappeared. ‘There’s a woman downstairs who read about you on the internet and
is desperate to see you.

‘Well, I’m not desperate to see
her,’
snapped
Eva.

‘Her daughter has been missing for three weeks.’

‘But why would she come to me? A woman who can’t get
out of bed?’

‘She’s convinced you can help her,’ said Alexander. ‘She’s
driven from Sheffield. The kid is called Amber, she’s thirteen years old —’

Eva cut in, ‘You shouldn’t have told me her name or
her age, I’ve got the child inside my head now’ She picked up a pillow and
screamed into it.

Alexander said, ‘So that’s a no, is it?’

49

Amber’s
mother, Jade, had not allowed herself to bathe, shower or wash her hair, and
she had not changed her clothes since her daughter’s disappearance. She was
still wearing the baby-pink tracksuit, now grey with dirt, that she had been
wearing on the day Amber went missing.

‘Amber was a happy, bubbly girl. I would normally
have driven her to school but we got up late, I wasn’t dressed. We didn’t have
time to make her a packed lunch. I was going to make it up and take it to her
later. She wouldn’t have been abducted … she’s not pretty enough. She’s
big-boned. She’s got awful hair. She’s got a brace on her top teeth. She wouldn’t
have been abducted … these perverts go for prettier girls on the whole, don’t
they?’

Eva nodded, then asked, ‘When was the last time you
slept?’

‘Oh, I mustn’t sleep or have a shower, and I can’t
wash my hair until Amber is back. I lie down on the settee at night with the
Sky news on, in case there’s word about her. My mother blames me. My husband
blames me. I blame me. Do you know where Amber is, Eva?’

‘No, I don’t,’ said Eva. ‘Lie down next to me.’

When
Alexander brought tea up for Eva and Jade, he found them fast asleep, side by
side. He felt a painful stab of jealousy, Jade was in
his
place. He
started to back out of the room but Eva heard a floorboard creak and opened her
eyes.

She smiled when she saw him, and carefully slid from
under the duvet to the end of the bed, where she sat with her legs dangling.

Alexander noticed that her toenails needed cutting
and that the pink varnish on them had almost vanished. Without speaking, he
took out the Swiss Army knife his wife had given him. It had many tools within
it, and was a bulky weight, but Alexander kept it close to him at all times. He
took Eva’s right foot, put it on his lap, and whispered, ‘Pretty feet, but the
toenails of a slut.’

Eva smiled.

Jade was still sleeping. Eva hoped that she was
dreaming of Amber, that they were together, in a place where they had been
happy.

When Alexander had carefully trimmed all of Eva’s
toenails, he pressed the clippers back into the body of the knife and pulled
out a small metal file.

Eva laughed quietly as he began to run it across her
newly clipped toenails. ‘Do you think Jesus was the first chiropodist?’

‘The first famous one,’ said Alexander.

‘Is there a celebrity chiropodist today?’ asked Eva.

‘I dunno. I cut my toenails myself, over a page torn
from the
London Review of Books.
Doesn’t everybody?’

They were talking at normal volume now, conscious
that Jade was sleeping the deep sleep that follows misery and exhaustion.

Alexander went out to his van and came back with a
bottle of white spirit and a white rag.

Eva said, ‘Are you going out to torch the neighbourhood?’

‘You may have been in bed for months, but there’s no
excuse for letting yourself go.’ He dipped the rag into the spirit and wiped
the old nail varnish from her fingers and toes. When he’d finished, he said, ‘And
now I’m going to “jooge” your hair.’ He produced a tiny pair of scissors from
the Swiss Army knife.

Eva laughed. ‘They’re from
Grimms’ Fairy Tales!
What
did you do over the weekend, cut the long grass in a meadow?’

‘Yeah,’ said Alexander, ‘for a wicked elf.’

‘And what would happen to you, if you failed your
task?’

‘Seven swans would peck my big brown eyes out,’ he
said, and then laughed too.

It took less than fifteen minutes to transform Eva’s
hair from ‘Safe Eva’ to ‘Hey Eva!’

‘And finally,’ said Alexander, the magical helper, ‘eyebrows.’
He picked up his knife and, with great concentration, teased out a pair of
tweezers so small that they were almost lost between his long fingers. We want
quizzical arches, not unusually hirsute caterpillars.’

Eva said, ‘Hirsute?’

‘It means —’

‘I know what it means, I’ve been living with an
unusually hirsute man for the last twenty-eight years.’

Eva felt a lightness in her body, a lack of gravity.
She had experienced the sensation before when she was a child and a game of
make-believe with other children had, for a few moments, soared and fused so
that the world of their imagination was more real than the dull everyday world,
which consisted mostly of unpleasant things. She felt the beginnings of a wild
exhilaration and could hardly keep still enough for Alexander to pluck her
brows.

She wanted to dance and sing but, instead, she
talked. She felt as though a gag had been removed from her mouth.

Neither of them heard Brian and Titania come in, eat
supper, or go to bed.

At
half past five in the morning, Alexander said, ‘I’ve gotta go home. My kids are
early risers, and their grandma ain’t.’ He looked at Amber’s mother and said, ‘Should
we let her sleep?’

‘I don’t want to wake her,’ said Eva. ‘Let her come
to life in her own time.’

Alexander picked up the painting and, keeping the
bare side of the canvas towards Eva, took it downstairs and left it in the
hall.

Eva heard him drive away in the still morning. He
had left his Swiss Army knife on the window sill. She picked it up, it was cold
to the touch.

She held it in her hands until it was warm.

Eva
was kneeling, looking at her reflection in the window, trying to check her
Joan of Arc haircut, when Amber’s mother stirred and woke. Eva watched her face
and saw the precise moment when the sleepiness left and the stark reality that
her child was missing hit her.

‘You shouldn’t have let me
sleep!
’ she said,
scrambling for her shoes and putting them on. She switched her phone on and
said, angrily, ‘Amber could have been trying to ring.’ She checked her phone. ‘Nothing,’
she said. ‘So, it’s good news, isn’t it?’ she said, brightly. ‘It means they
haven’t found her body, doesn’t it?’

Eva said, ‘I’m sure she’s alive.’

‘You’re sure?’

Jade grabbed at this morsel of optimism as though
Eva were the supreme keeper of all knowledge. ‘They said on the internet that
you’ve got special powers. Some people said that you’re a witch and you do
black magic.’

Eva smiled. ‘I haven’t even got a cat.’

‘I believe that you’re a good person. If we both sit
quietly and concentrate, do you think you could find out where she is? Can you
see her?’

Eva tried to backtrack, saying, ‘No, I haven’t got
extrasensory perception. I’m not a criminologist. I’m not qualified to give an
opinion, and I don’t know where Amber is. I’m sorry.’

‘Then why did you say you’re sure she’s alive?’

Eva was disgusted with herself, what she had wanted
to say was, ‘Most runaways are found alive.’

‘No, I think you’re right,’ said Amber’s mother. ‘I’d
know if she was dead.’

Eva said, ‘A lot of teenage girls run away to
London.’

‘She’s been once before. We saw
Les Misérables.
She
said she’d be on the side of the aristocrats. I couldn’t get her into
Poundstretcher.’ She was shaking her head. ‘What do I do next?’

‘Have a shower, wash your hair, clean your teeth.’

When
Jade emerged from the bathroom, Eva could tell that she was better equipped to
face the misery that had threatened to engulf her.

Eva asked, ‘Where are you going now?’

‘I’ve got a cash card, I’ve got petrol. I’ll drive
to London and look for her.’