The Woman Who Went to Bed for a Year (4 page)

She would not be chopping vegetables and browning
meat for a casserole. She would not be baking bread and cakes because Brian
preferred the home-made to the shop bought. She would not be cutting grass.’
weeding.’ planting and sweeping paths or collecting leaves in the garden. She
would not be painting the new fence with creosote. She would not be chopping
wood to light the real log fire that Brian sat next to after he came home from
work in the winter months. She would not be brushing her hair, showering or
hurriedly applying make-up.

Today she would not be doing any of those things.

She would not be worrying that her clothes were
uncoordinated, because she could not see the time when she would be wearing
clothes again. She would only be wearing pyjamas and a dressing gown for the
foreseeable future.

She would rely on other people to feed her, wash her
and buy her food. She didn’t know who these people were but she believed that
most people were longing to demonstrate their innate goodness.

She knew she wouldn’t be bored — she had a great
deal to think about.

She hurried to the lavatory, washed her face and
under her arms, but it felt wrong to be out of bed. She thought that with her
feet on the floor she would easily be lured downstairs by her own sense of
duty. Perhaps in future she would ask her mother for a bucket. She remembered
the porcelain potty under her grandmother’s sagging bed — as a child, it had
been Ruby’s job to empty the contents early every morning.

Eva lay back on the pillows and quickly fell asleep.’
only to be woken by Brian asking, What have you done with my clean shirts?’

Eva said, ‘I gave them to a passing washerwoman. She’s
going to take them to a babbling brook she knows and pummel them on the stones.
She’ll have them back by Friday.’

Brian, who had not been listening, shouted, ‘Friday!
That’s no good to me! I need one now!’

Eva turned over to face the window. A few golden
leaves were spiralling down from the sycamore outside. She said, ‘You don’t
have to wear a shirt. It’s not a condition of your employment. Professor Brady
dresses as if he was in The Rolling Stones.’

‘It’s bloody embarrassing.” said Brian. ‘We had a
delegation from NASA last week. Every last one of them was in a blazer, collar
and tie, and they were shown round by Brady in his creaking leather trousers,
Yoda T-shirt and down-at-heel cowboy boots! On
his
salary! All the
bloody cosmologists are the same. And when they’re together in the one room, it
looks like a meeting in a drug rehabilitation unit! I’m telling you, Eva, if it
wasn’t for we astronomers they’d be dead in the water!’

Eva turned back to him and said, ‘Wear your navy polo
shirt, your chinos and your brown brogues.’ She wanted him out of her room. She
would ask her uneducated mother to show Dr Brian Beaver BSc, MSc, D Phil
(Oxon) how to manipulate the simple dials on the washing machine.

Before Brian left the room she asked him, ‘Do you
think there
is
a God, Brian?’

He was sitting on the bed, tying his shoelaces. ‘Don’t
tell me you’ve got religion, Eva. It always ends in tears. According to Steve
Hawking’s
latest
book, God’s not fit for purpose. He’s a character in a
fairy tale.’

‘Then why do so many millions of people believe in
him?’

‘Look, Eva, the stats are against it. Something
can
actually come from nothing. Heisenbergian uncertainty allows a bubble of
space—time to inflate out of nowhere…’ He paused. ‘But I admit the particle
side is … difficult. The string theory supersymmetry boys
really
need
to find the Higgs boson. And the wave function collapse is always a problem.’

Eva nodded, and said, ‘I see. Thank you.’

He groomed his beard with Eva’s comb and said, ‘So,
how long do you intend to stay in bed?’

‘Where does the universe end?’ asked Eva.

Brian fiddled with his beard, twirling the scraggy
end between his fingers. ‘Can you tell me why you want to retreat from the
world, Eva?’

‘I don’t know how to live in it,’ she said. ‘I can’t
even work the remote. I preferred it when there were three channels and all you
had to do was go duh, duh, duh.’

She stabbed at the imaginary knobs on the imaginary
television.

‘So, you’re going to loll about in bed because you
can’t work the remote?’

Eva muttered, ‘I can’t work the new oven stroke
grill stroke microwave either. And I can’t work out how much we’re paying EON
per quarter on our electricity bill. Do we owe them money, Brian, or do they
owe us?’

‘I don’t know,’ he admitted. He took her hand and
said, ‘I’ll see you tonight. By the way, is sex off the menu?’

5

‘I
don’t sleep with Steve no more,’ said Julie. ‘He’s in the box room with his
PlayStation and
The Best of Guns and Roses.’

‘Don’t you miss him? Physically?’ asked Eva.

‘No, we still have sex! Downstairs, after the kids
have gone to bed. We used to have to fit it in during the adverts — you know
how much I love my soaps — but now we can just Sky Plus. Something had to be
done, after I missed the bit where Phil Mitchell took heroin for the first
time. So, why are you still in bed?’

‘I like it here,’ said Eva. She liked Julie but she
already wanted her to go.

Julie said, ‘My hair’s falling out.’

‘It’s not cancer?’

Julie laughed. ‘It’s the stress of work. There’s a
new manager, a woman called Mrs Damson. God knows where she’s from. She’s one
of them managers what expect you to work the full eight hours. When Bernard was
the manager, we hardly did no work. We’d go in at eight o’clock, I’d put the
kettle on, then me and the other girls would sit around in the staffroom having
a laugh until the customers started banging on the door to be let in. Sometimes,
for a laugh, we’d pretend not to hear them and we wouldn’t open the door until
half past nine. Yeah, Bernard were lovely to work for. Shame he’s gone. It
weren’t his fault our branch never made a profit. The customers just stopped
coming.’

Eva closed her eyes, feigning sleep, but Julie continued.

‘Mrs Damson had only been there three days when I
broke out in one of my rashes.’ She pushed the sleeve of her jumper up past her
elbow and shoved her bare arm in front of Eva. ‘Look, I’m covered in it.’

Eva said, ‘I can’t see anything.’

Julie pushed her sleeve down. ‘It’s fading now’ She
got up and walked about the bedroom. She picked up the bottle of Olay
Regenerist, which promised to rejuvenate the skin, gave a little laugh and
replaced it on the dressing table.

‘You’re having a breakdown,’ she said.

‘Am I?’

‘It’s the first symptom — when I went doolally after
Scott was born, I stayed in bed for five days. Steve had to fly back to his
rig. I was worried about him in the helicopter, they’re always crashing, Eva.
I wouldn’t eat, wouldn’t drink, didn’t wash my face. I just cried and cried. I
wanted a girl so bad. I’d already got four boys.’

‘So, you’d got a reason for feeling depressed.’

Julie continued, ignoring Eva, ‘I was so
sure.
I’d
only got pink clothes. When I took him out in his pram, people would look in
and say, “She’s gorgeous, what’s her name?”. I’d say Amelia because that’s the
name I would have given my little girl. Do you think that’s why our Scott is
gay?’

‘He’s only five,’ said Eva. ‘He’s far too young to
be anything.’

‘I bought him a little china tea service the other
week. Teapot, milk jug, sugar bowl, two cups and saucers, little miniature
spoons, very pretty, everything covered in pink roses. He played all day with
it, as well — until Steve came home and kicked it over.’ She gave a little
laugh. ‘Then he cried and cried.’

‘Scott?’ asked Eva.

‘No, Steve! Keep up.’

What did Scott do?’ said Eva.

‘Same as he always does when there’s trouble in the
house. He goes to my wardrobe and strokes my clothes.’

‘Isn’t that a bit —’

‘A bit what?’ said Julie.

‘A bit weird?’

‘Is it?’

Eva nodded.

Julie sat her large bulk on Eva’s bed. ‘To be
honest, Eva, I’ve somehow lost my way with my boys. They’re not bad lads but I
don’t know what to do with ‘em all. They’re so noisy and rough with each other.
The
noise
they make when they’re running up the stairs, the way they eat
and argue over the remote, their horrible boys’ clothes, the state of their
fingernails. Me and Steve are thinking about trying for a girl again, next time
he’s got shore leave. What do you think?’

Eva said, ‘No, I forbid it!’

Both women were surprised at Eva’s vehement tone.

Eva looked out of the window and saw a boy climbing the
sycamore in her front garden. Nodding towards the window, she said casually, ‘Isn’t
that one of your boys trying to climb our tree?’

Julie looked out of the window, then ran to open it.
She yelled,
‘Scott!
Get down, you’ll break your bleddy neck!’

Eva said, ‘He’s a boy, Julie. Put his tea set away.’

‘Yeah, I am going to try for a girl.’

As she was walking down the stairs, Julie thought, ‘Wish
it was me in that bed.’

6

Brianne
glanced at her watch. It was 1 1.35 a.m. She had been awake since 5.30 a.m., thanks
to Poppy’s chronic need for attention.

Poppy had been on Brianne’s phone for nearly an hour
to somebody called Marcus.

Brianne thought, ‘She’s wearing
my
charm
bracelet and using
my
phone and I haven’t got the guts to ask —no,
demand—
them back.’

Poppy said, into the phone, ‘So, you won’t lend me a
measly hundred quid? You’re such a tight bastard.’ She shook the phone, then
threw it down on the narrow bed. ‘The fucking credit’s gone!’ she said angrily,
looking at Brianne as if it were her fault.

Brianne said, ‘I was supposed to ring Mum.’ Poppy
said, ‘You’re lucky to have a mum. I’ve got nobody.’ She put on a ‘funny’
cockney accent. ‘Oh, poor Poppy, she’s all alone in the world. She ain’t got
nobody to love ‘er.’

Brianne forced herself to smile.

Poppy declared, in her normal voice, ‘I’m a good
actress. It was a toss-up between coming here and going to RADA. To be honest, I
don’t like the look of the students here. They’re so utterly provincial. And I’m
dreading starting American Studies — you don’t even get to visit America. I’m
thinking of changing to what you’re doing. What is it again?’

‘Astrophysics,’ said Brianne.

There was a gentle knocking on the door. Brianne
opened it. Brian Junior stood in the doorway. ‘Sultry’ was the word to describe
Brian’s early morning appearance. His lids were heavy and his bedhair was
seductively tousled.

Poppy shouted, ‘Hi, Bri! What have you been doing in
your room all this time, you dirty boy?’

Brian Junior blushed and said, ‘I’ll come back later…
when…’

‘No,’ said Brianne, ‘tell me now.

Brian Junior said, ‘It’s nothing much, but Dad rang
and said that after we’d gone Mum went to bed wearing all her clothes, even her
shoes, and she’s still there.’

Poppy said, ‘I’ve often worn shoes in bed. There’s
not a man alive that doesn’t like to see a woman in stilettos.’ She elbowed her
way past the twins, into the corridor and knocked on the next door along where
Ho Lin — a Chinese boy studying medicine — lived. When he came to the door
wearing his blue and white striped English pyjamas, Poppy said, ‘An emergency,
darling! Can I use your phone?’ She pushed in and closed the door.

Brianne and Brian Junior looked at each other. Neither
of them wanted to say what a monster Poppy was, and admit that she had
singlehandedly made their first taste of freedom miserable. They had been
brought up to think that if you didn’t speak it aloud, it didn’t exist. Their
mother was a reticent woman who had passed her reticence on to them.

Brianne said, ‘That’s what happens to women when
they get to be fifty. It’s called the men-o-pause.’

‘So, what do they do?’ Brian Junior asked.

‘Oh, they go mad, shoplift, stab their husbands, go
to bed for three days… that kind of thing.’

Brian Junior said, ‘Poor Mum. We’ll phone her after
the Freshers’ Fair.’

When
they got to the Students Union, they headed straight for the Mathematics Club.
They pushed through the crowds of drunken students, and eventually stood in
front of a trestle table covered in large laminated photocopied equations.

A youth wearing a tight knitted hat gasped and said,
‘Jesus Christ, you’re the Beaver twins! Huge respect. You two dudes are
awesome! No, no, you’re
legends.
A gold medal each at the IMO.’ He
looked at Brian Junior and said, ‘And the Special Prize. Mega respect. ‘A solution
of outstanding elegance.” Can you talk me through it? It would be an honour.’