The Woman Who Went to Bed for a Year (35 page)

When he approached Ruby, she said that the pounds
she had in her anorak pockets were donations to the Brown Bird & Beaver
Charity. PC Hawk asked if this charity was registered with the Charity
Commission, and was told that the registration was ‘in the post’.

He then moved to the crowd of what he thought of as ‘weirdos’,
warning them that if they didn’t stop singing, ululating, tinkling bells and
chanting ‘Eva! Eva! Eva!’ he would charge them all with a breach of the peace.

An anarchist in an army greatcoat, camouflage trousers
and a black polo-neck sweater had spent an hour writing ‘HELP THE POLICE — BEAT
YOURSELF Up’ on his forehead. He shouted feebly, ‘We’re living in a Police
State.’

PC Hawk’s hand twitched towards his Taser, but he
was reassured when a bulky woman in a Noddy hat said, ‘England is the best
country in the world, and our police are absolutely terrific!’

The anarchist gave a harsh laugh.

PC Hawk said, ‘Thank you, madam, it’s nice to be
appreciated.’

He thought the whole set-up was a disgrace. There
were Asian people everywhere he looked, some on their knees praying, some
sitting on a blanket having what looked like breakfast, and a large gang of
elderly Muslim, Christian and Hindu women had gathered under Eva’s window,
clapping and singing. There were no crowd barriers, no surveillance team,
nobody directing the traffic. He rang for reinforcements, then walked over to
the two old women standing in the doorway of number 15.

He demanded of Yvonne that he be taken to see the
householder.

Yvonne said, ‘My son, Dr Brian Beaver, is at work,
saving the world from attack by meteorites. You’d better talk to Eva herself.
She’s upstairs, second on the left.’

PC Hawk could not help but be a little thrilled that
he was about to meet the Eva woman who’d been on the front of the paper, and
all over the internet, and who he’d seen on the television news refusing to
talk to good old Derek Plimsoll. This proved to him that she had something to
hide.

Who wouldn’t want to be on television?

It was his ambition to be the police spokesman for a
murder enquiry. He knew all the phrases and sometimes practised them inside his
head when he was driving around, bored, on his way to caution a youth for
riding a moped without lights.

He
saw Eva before she saw him. He was startled by her beauty — she was supposed to
be an old woman of fifty, wasn’t she?

Eva was shocked to see a gangly baby-faced boy in a
police uniform. She said, ‘Hello, have you come to arrest me?’

He took out his notebook and said, ‘Not at this
stage, madam, but I’d like to ask you a few questions. For how long have you
been in bed?

Eva tried to do the maths inside her head, then
said, ‘Since the nineteenth of September.’

The constable blinked a few times and said, ‘Nearly
five months?’

She shrugged her shoulders.

‘And are you separated from your husband?’

‘No.’

‘Are you planning to leave your husband in the near
future?’ he asked, emboldened by her frank response.

Eva had watched her fair share of police dramas on
television, and thought she knew about police procedures. But as the interview
progressed, she began to realise that PC Hawk’s questions were entirely centred
on herself— and her willingness to be courted by a young policeman.

Their final exchange was particularly ludicrous. ‘What
is your attitude towards the police?’

‘I think they’re a necessary evil.’ Would you ever
consider dating a police officer?’

‘No, I don’t get out of bed.’

She was relieved when the blushing boy finally said,
‘One last question.
Why
won’t you get out bed?’

Eva answered, honestly, ‘I don’t know.’

When
PC Hawk returned to the station, he asked his superior officer if he could act
as a family liaison officer for The Woman in Bed.

‘She’s causing a lot of trouble, the residents are
posh and there’s talk of a petition. And one of ‘em’s a solicitor, sir.’

Sergeant Price was wary of the middle classes. He’d
once been involved in a court case for slapping a youth about in the cells. How
was he to know that the youth’s father was a solicitor’s clerk?

‘Yeah, why not?’ he said to PC Hawk. ‘The family
liaison officers are both off on maternity leave. And you’re the nearest thing
we’ve got to a woman.

As PC Hawk walked towards his car, his soft cheeks
blazed. He thought, ‘Yeah, I’m definitely growing a moustache as soon as my
beard comes through.’

It
was an off-duty policeman called Dave Strong who found Amber. She was begging
at the base of the Gherkin with a seventeen-year-old youth called Timmo, known
to his parents as Timothy.

PC Strong had acted on his intuition — he had
thought it odd to see a young girl in a soiled school uniform with her hand
out, beseeching indifferent office workers to, ‘Spare some change!’ accompanied
by Timmo singing his desultory version of Wonderwall’.

However, when interviewed by the press, Amber’s
mother attributed her daughter’s rescue to Eva, rather than to the policeman. ‘She
has special powers,’ Jade told a sceptical journalist from the
Daily Telegraph.
‘She can see things that we can’t.’

As a news item, it had everything — young love and
possible underage sex in
The Sun
and (because Timmo had run away from
his A levels) an article in the
Guardian:
‘Are we pushing our young too
hard?’

The press eagerly pounced on this nugget of new Eva
information. The
Daily Mail,
who were about to go with ‘Eva is
ex-librarian’, scrapped their front page and replaced it with ‘ESP Eva finds
runaway’.

52

At
noon on Valentine’s Day, Brian and Titania came into Eva’s room.

She could tell that both of them had been crying.
She was not too alarmed — it seemed to her that British people had long ago
stopped puffing themselves together, they now cried habitually in public and
were
applauded
for it. Those who didn’t cry easily were labelled ‘anal’.

Brian said, with a sob, ‘Mummy’s dead.’

Eva said, when she was able to breathe, ‘Your mum or
mine?’

‘Mine,’ he wailed.

‘Thank God for that,’ she thought. She said to
Brian, ‘Bri, I’m so
sorry.’

‘She was a wonderful mother,’ Brian cried.

Titania attempted to take him in her arms, but he
pushed her away and went to Eva, who felt obliged to pat his back. She thought,
‘This display from a man who “didn’t see the point” of buying his mother a
birthday present, on the grounds that “she doesn’t need anything”.’

‘She fell off her stepladder trying to reach her
emergency cigarettes,’ said Titania, her voice breaking and tears welling in
her eyes.

Eva was not to know, but the real reason that
Titania was crying was because Brian had not given her a Valentine’s Day card
or a box of Turkish delight, as he had every year since their affair had begun.

Brian said, ‘Another casualty of smoking. She’s been
dead for three days. What kind of society do we live in when an old lady can
lie on her kitchen floor dead
for three days
before anybody notices?’

Who found her?’ asked Eva.

‘Peter, the window cleaner,’ said Brian.

‘Our
Peter, the
window cleaner?’ said Eva.

‘He rang the police and they broke the door down,’
explained Titania.

‘Yes, and Peter can bloody well pay for a
replacement door. He knows very well we keep a spare key here,’ said Brian.

Titania said, ‘He’s in shock.’

Brian shouted, ‘He’ll be even more shocked when I
give him the bloody bill for a new uPVC triple-glazed door with a state-of-the-art
mortise lock!’

‘No, you’re
in shock,’
pressed Titania.

‘She was the best mother a man could have,’ said
Brian, with a quivering lip.

Eva and Titania exchanged a surreptitious smile.

The doorbell rang.

Titania looked at Eva in bed and Brian weeping, and
said, ‘I suppose I’ll have to go.’

When
she opened the door, she received her usual reception. Shouts of ‘Adulteress!’,
‘Sinner!’, ‘Slag!’ Try as she might, she could not get used to the abuse she
received whenever she was exposed to the crowd.

A woman in a green tabard was holding a huge bouquet
of mixed white flowers, wrapped in white tissue and tied with a white satin
ribbon. As Titania searched through the flowers, in anticipation of finding a
card addressed to herself from Brian, the post van drew up in the middle of the
road.

When the florist and the postman passed each other
on the path, they exchanged sympathetic small talk.

‘Nightmare day!’ she said.

He replied, ‘Nearly as bad as Christmas!’

She said, ‘Still, I’m being took out tonight, for a slap-up
meal.’

Titania winced at ‘slap-up meal’.

‘Does your husband know?’ said the postman.

Titania was amazed at the volume and duration of
their laughter. They could not have been more amused had Peter Kay himself
appeared at the end of the path and launched into a new routine.

Titania found the little card. ‘To Eva, my love.’

She yelled at the two delivery people, ‘Why do you
do
your fucking jobs, if you hate them so much?’

The postman said, What’s up … nobody love you?’ He
handed her a large pack of letters and cards bound in an elastic band. ‘Just
before I left the depot, I seen another big sack for Eva come in. I’ll need a
trolley tomorrow’

Titania said, fiercely, ‘Valentine’s Day is yet
another example of how the market commodifies socio-sexual relationships,
transforming love from a state of “being” to a representation of “having”, and
ultimately degrading us all. So, I’m proud that those who love
me
have
not fallen into the “card ‘n’ chocolates’’ trap.’

She went inside and slammed the door, but she could
still hear the postman’s mocking laughter. Perhaps she should have used simpler
language, but she refused to patronise uneducated people.

Why shouldn’t they rise to her level?

When
Eva had the white bouquet thrust into her arms, she knew at once who it was
from. It was written in Venus’s neat handwriting, and she deduced that Thomas
had drawn the wobbly kisses on the bottom of the card.

She said, ‘If I were in charge of Interflora, I
would make it company policy that chrysanthemums were not allowed in bouquets.
They smell of death.’

Brian was slumped in the soup chair, talking about
identifying his mother. ‘She looked as though she was sleeping,’ he said. ‘But
she was wearing those bloody kangaroo slippers that Ruby bought her for
Christmas. They’re death traps, I did warn her. It’s no wonder she fell off
that stepladder.’ He looked at Eva. ‘Your mother is directly responsible for my
mother’s death.’

Eva kept quiet.

Brian went on, ‘Rigor mortis had set in. The doctor
had to prise a packet of Silk Cut from out of her dead fingers.’ He wiped his
eyes with a balled-up tissue. ‘She’d made a jelly for herself, in a small
pudding basin. It was still on the kitchen table. It was covered in a thin
layer of dust. She would have hated that.’

Titania said, ‘Tell Eva about the letters.’

‘I can’t, Tit.’ He started to sob, loudly.

Titania said, ‘She’d written letters to herself,
love letters. Like in the song, she sat right down and wrote herself a letter.
And there was an envelope in her handbag, addressed to Alan Titchmarsh.’

Brian wailed, ‘Should we put a stamp on it and post
it for her? I don’t know the etiquette surrounding death and the postal system.’

Eva said, ‘Nor do I — and personally, I don’t care
if the letter to Mr Titchmarsh is posted or not.’

Brian said, sounding a little hysterical, ‘Something
has to be done with the bloody thing. Do I carry out her wishes or not?’

Titania said, ‘Calm yourself, Bri. It’s not as
though Alan Titchmarsh is expecting a letter from your mother.’

Brian wept. ‘She never, ever sent
me
a
letter. Not even to congratulate me on my doctorate.’

Eva heard Alexander’s voice under the window, and
felt huge relief. He would know what to do with the bloody, stupid Titchmarsh
letter. After all, he had been to public school. She felt herself relax. Then
she heard her mother’s voice. She looked out and saw Alexander supporting
Ruby, who was dressed entirely in black, including a felt hat with black
netting halfway down her face.