The Woman Who Went to Bed for a Year (5 page)

Brian Junior said, ‘Well, yes, if you’ve got a spare
two hours.’

The youth in the hat said, ‘Listen, any time,
anywhere. A tutorial from Brian Beaver Junior would look
sooperb
on my
CV. Let me get a pen?’

A small crowd of onlookers had gathered around Brian
Junior and Brianne. Word had spread that the Beaver twins were in the hall. As
Brian Junior recited from memory the proof he had conjured up from nowhere —
the examining professors had never even imagined it as an answer — he heard
Brianne say, ‘Oh shit!’

Poppy had stolen up behind them. She shouted, ‘Found
you!’ Then, playfully wagging a finger at them both, said, ‘You really must get
into the habit of letting me know where you’re going After all, you
are
my
best friends.’ She was wearing an old taffeta evening dress over a black polo
neck. She turned to the youth in the hat and said, ‘May I join, please?
Although I’m a bear of very little brain, I might give your serious little
group a bit of badly needed glam. And I wouldn’t disturb you in your
calculations. I would sit at the back and keep my pretty mouth shut until I’m
up to speed?’

Brian Junior temporarily forgotten, the student
handed Poppy an application form with an eager smile.

7

Eva
regretted the day that Marks & Spencer had introduced elastane pyjamas for
men. They did not flatter the middle-aged body. Brian’s genitals looked like a
small bag of spanners through the unforgiving material.

After three nights’ troubled sleep, Brian had
pleaded to be allowed to return to the marital bed, citing his bad back.

Eva reluctantly gave in.

Brian went through his pre-bed routine, as he always
had: gargling and spitting in the bathroom, winding the alarm clock, turning
the shipping forecast on, hunting in each corner of the room and under the bed
for spiders with a child’s fishing net he kept inside the wardrobe, switching
what he called ‘the big light’ off, opening the small window, then sitting on
the side of the bed and removing his slippers, always the left one first.

Eva couldn’t remember when Brian had turned into a
middle-aged man. Perhaps it was when he had started to make a noise as he got
up from a chair.

Normally he would talk about his day in monotonous
detail, about people she had never met, but tonight he was silent. When he got
into bed, he lay so close to the edge that Eva was reminded of a man teetering
on the edge of a snake pit.

She said, ‘Goodnight, Brian,’ in her normal voice.

He said, out of the darkness, ‘I don’t know what to
say when people ask me why you’ve taken to your bed. It’s embarrassing for me.
I can’t concentrate at work. And I’ve got my mother and your mother asking questions
I can’t answer. And I’m used to knowing the answers — I’m a Doctor of
Astronomy, for fuck’s sake. And Planetary Science.’

Eva said, ‘You’ve never once answered me properly
when I ask you if God exists.’

Brian threw his head back and shouted, ‘For God’s
sake! Use your own bloody brain!’

Eva said, ‘I haven’t used my brain for so long, the
poor thing is huddled in a corner, waiting to be fed.’

‘You’re constantly mixing up the concept of heaven
with the bloody cosmos! And if your mother asks me one more time to read her
stars… I have explained the difference between an astronomer and an
astrologer a million fucking times!’ He jumped out of bed, stubbed his toe on
the bedside cabinet, screamed and limped out of the room. She heard the door to
Brian Junior’s room slam.

Eva fumbled in the cupboard of her bedside table,
where she kept her most precious things, and pulled out her school exercise
books. She had kept them clean and safe for over thirty years. As she leafed
through them the moonlight shone on the golden stars she had won for her
excellent work.

She had been a very clever girl whose essays were
always read aloud in class, and she was told by her teachers that with hard
study and a grant she might even get to university. But she had been needed to
go to work and bring in a wage. And how could Ruby afford to buy a grammar
school uniform from a specialist shop on a widow’s pension?

In 1977 Eva left the Leicester High School for Girls
and trained as a telephonist at the GPO. Ruby took two-thirds of her wages for
bed and board.

When Eva was sacked for constantly connecting the
wrong line to the wrong customer, she was too afraid to tell her mother, so she
went and sat in the little Arts and Crafts-designed library and read her way
through a selection of the English classics. Then, a fortnight after her
sacking, the Head Librarian — a cerebral man who had no managerial skills — put
up a notice advertising a vacancy for a library assistant: ‘Qualifications
Essential.’

She had no suitable qualifications. But at the
informal interview the Head Librarian told Eva that in his opinion she was
supremely qualified since he had seen her reading
The Mill on the Floss,
Lucky Jim, Bleak House
and even
Sons and Lovers.

Eva told her mother that she had changed her job and
would in future be earning less, at the library.

Ruby said she was a fool and that books were overrated
and very unhygienic. ‘You never know who’s been messing about with the pages.’

But Eva loved her job.

To unlock the heavy outer door and to walk into the
hushed interior, with the morning light spilling from the high windows on to
the waiting books, gave her such pleasure that she would have worked for
nothing.

8

It
was in the afternoon of the fifth day that Peter, the window cleaner, called.
Eva had slept on and off for twelve hours. She had promised herself this
indulgence ever since the twins had been lifted out of her womb, and placed
into her arms over seventeen years ago.

Brianne had been a sickly child, pasty and irritable
with a scribble of black hair and a permanent scowl. She slept fitfully and
woke at the slightest noise. Eva would hear her baby daughter’s thin wail and
dash to pick her up before it turned into relentless screaming. Brian Junior
slept through the night, and when he woke in the morning he played with his
toes and smiled at the Scooby-Doo mobile above his head. Ruby would say, ‘This
child has come straight from heaven.’

When Brianne was screaming in Eva’s arms, Ruby’s
advice was, ‘Put an inch or two of brandy in her bottle. My main used to. It
didn’t do me any harm.’

Eva would look at Ruby’s raddled face and shudder.

She had spoken to her window cleaner once a month
for the past ten years, yet she knew nothing about him —apart from the fact
that his name was Peter Rose and he was married, with a disabled daughter
called Abigail. She heard his ladder scraping up the side of the house before
coming to a rest on the window sill. Had she wanted to hide, she could have run
into the bathroom but she decided to ‘style it out’ — an expression which
Brianne frequently used and which Eva interpreted as smiling in the face of
awkward social situations.

So, Eva smiled and waved awkwardly when she saw
Peter’s head appear above the sill. His cheeks reddened with embarrassment. He
poked his head round the open window and said, ‘Do you want me to come back
later?’

‘No,’ she said. ‘You can do them now’

He smeared soapy water all over the window and asked,
Are you poorly?’

‘I just wanted to stay in bed,’ she said.

‘That’s what I wanna do on my day off,’ he agreed. ‘Curl
up and ‘ibernate. But I can’t. Not with Abigail…’

‘How is she?’ asked Eva.

‘Same as always,’ said Peter, ‘but heavier. She don’t
talk, she can’t walk, she don’t do nothing for herself…’ He paused while he
rubbed furiously at the window ‘She’s in nappies and she’s fourteen. She ain’t
even pretty. Her mum dresses her beautiful. She’s always colour coordinated and
her hair is always done immaculate. Abigail is lucky, I reckon. She’s got the
finest mum in the world.’

Eva said, ‘I couldn’t do it.’

Peter was using a hand-held device that looked like
a truncated windscreen wiper to clear the window of excess water.

Why couldn’t you do it?’ he asked, as if he
genuinely wanted to know.

Eva said, ‘All that work. Humping a
fourteen-year-old about and getting nothing back. I couldn’t do it.’

Peter said, ‘That’s how I feel. She never smiles,
never even acknowledges you when you’ve done something nice for her. Sometimes
I think she’s taking the piss. Simone tells me I’m wicked for thinking that.
She says I’m stacking up bad karma. She says Abigail is the way she is because
of me. She could be right. I done a lot of bad things when I was a kid.’

Eva said, ‘I’m sure it’s nothing you did. Abigail is
here for a reason.

Peter asked, ‘What is the reason?’

Eva said, ‘Perhaps it’s to bring out your good side,
Pete.’

As he gathered his equipment together to climb down
the ladder, he said, Abigail sleeps in our bed now I’m in a single bed in the
spare room. I’m living like an old man and I’m only thirty-four. I’ll be
growing hairs in my ears next and singing “It’s A Long Fucking Way To Tipperary”.’

He disappeared from view and, moments later, the
ladder was removed.

Eva was overwhelmed by Peter’s sad story. She imagined
him passing the bedroom where his wife and daughter lay together, before going
into the spare room and lying down on the single bed. She started to cry and
found that she couldn’t stop.

She eventually slept and dreamed of being stuck on
the top of a ladder.

The
cordless phone in its flimsy holder startled her with its high-pitched electronic
chirp. Eva looked at it with loathing. She hated this phone. She could never
remember the combination of beige buttons she had to press to connect her to
whoever was phoning. Sometimes a clipped voice informed the caller: ‘Eva and
Brian are not available to take your call. Leave a message after the beep.’ Eva
would run out of the room and close the door. Later, she would listen to the
caller’s message in an agony of embarrassment.

Eva tried to answer the phone but activated a message
from the answering machine that she had not heard before. She wanted to run
but, trapped in bed, all she could do was barricade her ears with pillows. Even
so, her mother’s voice came through.

‘Eva! Eva? Oh, I hate these bleddy answerwhatsits! I’m
ringing to tell you that Mrs Whatsit, the one who kept the wool shop, you know
the one — tall, thin, big Adam’s apple, always knitting, knit, knit, knit, had
a little mongol boy what she put in a home, called him Simon, which is quite
cruel when you think about it — her name’s gone right out of my … it begins
with a “B”. That’s it! Pamela Oakfield! Well, she’s dead! Found her in the
shop. She fell on one of her own knitting needles! Went straight through her
heart. The question is who’s going to run the shop? Simon can’t do it in his
condition. Anyway, funeral’s a week on Thursday. I shall wear black. I know it’s
the trend to dress like clowns nowadays, but I’m too old to change now So,
anyway … Oh, I hate these answering whatsits. I never know what to say!’

Eva imagined a Down’s Syndrome boy running a wool
shop. And then wondered why the boy and his friends had an
extra
chromosome?
Did we normal people
lack
a chromosome? Had nature miscalculated her
ratios? Were the narrow-eyed kindly souls with their short tongues and ability
to fall in and out of love in a day meant to rule the world?

Ruby’s old message played for two minutes, but when
it finally ended the phone continued to ring. Eva reached down and pulled the
cord from its wall socket. Then she thought about the children. How else would
they reach her in an emergency? Her mobile had run out of battery and she had
no intention of charging it. She reconnected the phone. It was still ringing.
She picked up the receiver and waited for someone to speak.

Eventually, an educated voice said, ‘Hello, I’m
Nicola Forester. Is this Mrs Eva Beaver breathing down the phone or is it a
household pet?’

Eva said, ‘It’s me, Eva.’

The voice said, ‘Oh dear, and you sound so nice. I’m
going to throw a bucket of cold water over your marriage, I’m afraid.’

Eva thought, ‘Why do posh people always bring bad
news?’

The voice continued, ‘Your husband has been having
an affair with my sister for the last eight years.

A few seconds of time stretched into an eternity.
Eva’s brain could not quite compute the words she had just heard. Her first
reaction was to laugh aloud at the thought of Brian cavorting with another
woman in a house she did not know, with a person she had never met. It was
impossible to think that Brian had a life outside of his work and their home.

She said to the woman, ‘Forgive me, but could you
possibly ring back in ten minutes?’