The Woman Who Went to Bed for a Year (43 page)

She had said then, ‘My love for you is infinite,
Brian.’ Brian had been tempted to correct her use of ‘infinite’, but instead
had said, ‘I love you more than there are stars in the sky.’

They had been lying together, looking up at a Victorian
brass light fitting which Poppy was afraid might fall from its mountings and
kill them both. She wouldn’t want to be found all mashed up with an old fat
bloke who was nearly a pensioner.

She had placed his free hand on her belly and said, ‘Bri,
we’re going to have a baby.’

Brian was not keen on babies. After the twins were
born, he had volunteered to work in Australia but had been turned down on the
grounds that he was now ‘a family man’.

After a tiny pause, he had said, ‘How marvellous.’

She could tell he didn’t want the baby. She didn’t
want Brian either. But whoever had said life was just a bowl of cherries had
forgotten that inside each cherry was a hard stone, waiting to catch the
unwary, resulting in a chipped tooth, a choking fit, slipping and falling.

All caused by those innocuous little cherry stones.

Now there was a gentle knock at the door. Brian
leapt to his feet, pulled Eva’s comb through his beard and opened the door.

Poppy said, ‘What took you so long?’ She was wearing
an orange poppy in her hair, and a flower-sprigged prom dress with Mary Jane
shoes. She was not wearing her new piercings, and she had washed her face clean
of make-up.

When Brian opened the door she was dismayed to see
that he was in an old git’s dressing gown and the type of slippers that
cartoonists draw He was also carrying a mug of Horlicks, the smell of which
made Poppy heave. What Poppy saw when the door opened was the grandfather
illustration in her
Heidi
book. Brian’s beard hadn’t turned white yet,
but it would not be long. His ankles looked so frail and pasty in the big
slippers that she was surprised they could hold him up without snapping. He
pulled her inside as though he were taking delivery of Semtex.

Brian said, ‘Darling, you look so sweet, so
charming, so young.’

Poppy sat on the end of the bed with her little
finger crooked in the side of her mouth.

‘In other circumstances she would have looked gormless,’
thought Brian. But this was his Poppy, the mercurial child/woman whose presence
he craved. He turned on the MP3 player that he had dug out of a drawer at home
for the occasion. He searched the short playlist, found
Songs for Swingin’
Lovers,
selected ‘You Make Me Feel So Young’ and pressed play.

‘Ugh!’ thought Poppy. ‘More of that dead bloke,
Frank Sinatra.’

When Poppy went into the bathroom, Brian lay on the
bed and arranged the dressing gown so that his pale upper thighs were exposed.
Because his feet had hard skin and corns, he kept his slippers on.

When she came out of the bathroom, she was naked
apart from the flower in her hair. Before she turned the light off, her
slightly swollen belly was in profile.

Brian thought, ‘I wonder if it has been
scientifically proven that Homo sapiens can actually expire from a surfeit of
love? If so, I’m a dying man.’

Poppy gritted her teeth, and thought, ‘C’mon, Poppy,
come on, girl, it’ll all be over in five minutes. Close your eyes and think of
Brian Junior.’

After the little struggle on the bed was over, and
Brian lay on his back gasping for air, Poppy looked down at him and thought, ‘He
looks like an overfed, dying goldfish.’ She said, Wow! That was awesome! Wow!
Wow! Amazing!’

Brian thought, ‘Eva never once responded to my
lovemaking like Poppy does.’

Poppy climbed off him and went back into the bathroom.
He heard the shower over the bath running, and for a moment he thought about
joining her. But his knees had been giving him gip lately and he wasn’t sure if
he could lift his legs over the side of the bath. He suspected arthritis, it
was in the Beaver family genes.

Poppy stayed in the shower for a long time. She
spent most of it sitting in the bath and watching the hot water spiralling down
the plughole.

When she got out, Brian was in a deep sleep. She
found £250 in his wallet and, on the ‘personal details’ page of his Letts
Diary, the code to his debit card. After checking his trouser and jacket
pockets, she found £7.39 in small change and his phone. She scrolled through
some of his photographs, they were mostly boring stars and planets. However,
there was one of Brian with his wife and kids, taken in front of a gigantic
rocket.

Brian and the twins looked like dorks, but Eva was
beautiful. Poppy’s throat tightened. She knew she wasn’t beautiful or nice or
famous like Eva, but she had something that Eva would never have again, her
youth. Her own flesh was smooth and tight, and men like Brian would pay heavily
to touch it.

As she dressed, she composed a plan. She grabbed the
little pencil and pad that the hotel provided and sat down at the desk to
write.

Start going to
lectures.

Prostitute self
with more old men.

Seduce married
lecturer, tell him after one month I’m pregnant.

Accept payments
towards cost of baby.

Go on holiday to
Thailand when baby nearly due (disguise bump from airline).

Have baby.

Sell baby.

Return from
holiday in mourning.

Show photo of pretty deceased
baby to all three lovers.

When she was dressed, and the flower had been put
back behind her ear, Poppy took Brian’s phone and texted:

dear
Brian I taken ur £ to buy baby

clothes
and equipment. got to rush.

essay
to write on Leonard Cohen.

his
part in America’s post Vietnam

melancholia,
let’s meet again sooner

than
soonest. as the yanks say, missing

you
already! love, your little Poppy. p.s.

taken
ur card for taxi.

66

Alexander
heard a police siren, but he carried on painting. He had waited for the sun to
rise over the far corner of the cornfield. He had almost given up before he had
properly begun. The loveliness of the corn as it responded to the breeze was,
given his limited skills, too fine to capture with a brush and watercolours.

Almost an hour passed before he stopped. He
unwrapped the tinfoil from his cheese sandwiches, and unscrewed the lid of his
Thermos flask. Why did coffee always smell better than it tasted?

As he ate and drank, he was conscious that he was
happy. His children were well, he had no serious debts, his paintings were
beginning to sell — slowly. And now that his locks were gone, he could go into
a shop without the shopkeeper hovering over the panic button.

He forced himself not to think about Eva, who he had
not seen for what seemed like an eternity.

He and Eva had never sat at a table together and
shared a meal. They had not danced together. He didn’t know her favourite song,
and now he never would.

Ruby
was glad she had Stanley to talk to. She told him about Eva’s increasingly
erratic recent behaviour, singing and reciting poems and making lists. She also
confided that Eva wanted her door to be boarded up, apart from an aperture that
would enable food and drink to be passed through.

Stanley said, ‘I don’t want to alarm you, Ruby, but
that does sound fairly
mad.’

Peter
had boarded the door up, with Eva passing him the nails. By the time Ruby came
back from tea at Stanley’s house, the job was done.

There is nothing Eva can do now but sort out her
memories, and wait to see who will keep her alive.

There is a chink of light in Eva’s room. It comes
from the badly boarded-up window It shines on to the wall opposite. Eva lies in
bed and watches the intensity of the light. Just before the sun goes down, the
light puts on a show of orange, pink and yellow The colours of confectionery.
The chink of light is vital to her. She has put it there herself and now she is
terrified that somebody will take it away.

She wants to be a baby and start again. From the
stories Ruby tells about Eva’s infancy, she has concluded that it was grim:
she was pushed to the bottom of the garden to scream. Ruby’s voice came to her
when the twins were babies. ‘Don’t pick them up when they cry, you’ll
mollycoddle them. They need to know who’s boss from the start.’

Whenever Eva tried to cuddle the twins, their little
bodies would go rigid and two sets of eyes would stare into her own without
even the ghost of a smile.

67

In
the world outside, the
Sun
headline blared, ‘EVA STARVES!’ And there was
a quote within the front-page story:

Mrs
Julie Eppingham, 39, said, ‘The last time I saw her, I was horrified. She is
obviously anorexic. But she won’t talk to me or look at my new baby. She
obviously needs medical attention.’

Nurse
Spears was walking through the surgery waiting room when she saw a copy of
The
Sun
that had been discarded by a patient. She picked it up and read the
front page. Her first thought was for her career. She should have visited Mrs
Beaver more often to check for bedsores and muscle atrophy — and her mental
health.

She drove round to Bowling Green Road and sat outside
in her car, reading Eva’s full notes.

Sandy Lake knocked on the driver’s window with her
good hand. The other was encased in plaster. As yet nobody had written on it.
William didn’t do writing on plaster.

She asked, ‘Is Eva poorly?’

Nurse Spears wound the window down and said, ‘I can’t
disclose information about my patients.’

She wound the window up, but Sandy Lake was beyond
shame and continued to ask questions. Nurse Spears felt intimidated by the
woman in a silly knitted hat. She was relieved when she saw a policeman. She
parped the horn and PC Hawk walked towards the car.

He didn’t believe in hurrying, he was always solemn
and purposeful. He bent down at the driver’s window, and Nurse Spears asked if
he would escort her to number 15.

Sandy Lake demanded to accompany Nurse Spears.

PC Hawk said to her, ‘You’re supposed to be five
hundred metres away.’

Sandy said, ‘I’m going further than that soon.
William and I are going to live in a squat.’

Nurse Spears said, ‘That’s shocking.’

Why? It’s my own house.’

PC Hawk looked at Nurse Spears, and waggled his
forefinger at his temple.

Nurse Spears snapped, ‘I’d already worked that out.’

Upstairs,
in the pitch dark of her bedroom, Eva was nearly through the gentle exercise
regime she’d copied from PE lessons at school over thirty-five years ago. Eva
hated any lesson that involved communal showers. She was amazed that some girls
stood around naked, talking to the PE teacher, Miss Brawn. Eva was ashamed of
her towel, which was not big enough to wrap around her body, and was grey and
musty because she repeatedly forgot to take the thing home to wash.

Over breakfast in the 19705 it had been Ruby’s pleasure
to teach her daughter good manners. On one such occasion Ruby had taught her
that, should there be a conversational lull, it was Eva’s duty to fill it.

Eva was an earnest girl at twelve and anxious to do
the right thing. Once, when walking back from the athletics track in the
extensive school grounds, she had caught up with Miss Brawn as their steps
became synchronised. Eva had not known whether it was right to stay
synchronised, fall back or run ahead. She snatched a quick glance at Miss Brawn’s
face. She looked unbearably sad.

Eva blurted out, ‘What are you cooking for Sunday
dinner?’

Miss Brawn looked startled, but said, ‘I thought a
leg of lamb—’

‘And will you make a mint sauce?’ asked Eva,
politely.

‘Not make,
buy!’
said Miss Brawn.

There was a long silence, which Eva filled with, ‘Do
you have roast potatoes or mash?’

Miss Brawn sighed and said, ‘Both!’ Then she continued,
‘Didn’t your parents teach you that it is bad manners to ask so many personal
questions?’

‘No,’ said Eva, ‘they didn’t.’

Miss Brawn looked Eva full in the face and said, ‘You
should only speak when you have something worth saying. Idiotic questions
about my plans for Sunday lunch are not appropriate.’.

Eva had thought to herself, ‘I’ll keep my mouth
shut, and I’ll think my own thoughts.’

And after all those years the grown-up Eva could
still smell the cut grass, see the sunlight on the old red brick of the school
building, and feel the thud of humiliation in her heart as she ran from Miss
Brawn’s side, to find somewhere to hide until her cheeks had stopped burning.