The Woman Who Went to Bed for a Year (10 page)

He looked at it and laughed. ‘Yeah, I can see why
you’d want to get rid of that. It’s like a wooden Stonehenge.’ He opened the
doors and looked inside.

The wardrobe was still jammed with Brian and Eva’s
clothes and shoes.

Are you going to empty it?’

‘No.” she said. ‘I have to stay in or on the bed.’

‘Sorry, I didn’t realise you were ill.’

She said, ‘I’m not ill. I’m just retreating from the
world … I think.’

‘Yeah? Well, we all have our own way of doing that.
So, will you be staying in bed?’

She said, ‘I have to.’

And where do you want me to put the clothes and the
shoes?’

It
took hours to empty her side of the wardrobe.

They developed a system. Alexander got four large
bin liners from the kitchen. One was for recycling, another for charity shops,
a third for selling on eBay, and the last was to take to the vintage clothing
shop that Alexander’s sister ran in newly fashionable Deptford. There was a
separate bag for shoes.

It took a long time because each garment evoked a
memory of time and place. There was her last school uniform — a grey pleated
skirt, white shirt and green blazer trimmed with purple braid, which she had
worn until she left school. The sight of it shocked Eva. She was sixteen again,
with the heavy hand of failure on one shoulder and a weighty bag of textbooks
and folders on the other.

It went into the eBay pile.

Alexander pulled out an evening dress. It was off
the shoulder, black chiffon scattered with non-precious gemstones.

‘Now this I like,’ he said as he took it over to
her.

‘My first Summer Ball with Brian at the university.’
She sniffed the bodice and smelled patchouli oil, sweat and cigarettes. She
couldn’t make a decision as to where the dress should go.

Alexander did it for her. He folded it into the
vintage bag. From then on, it was he who sorted the clothes.

There were the sundresses with halter necks that she’d
worn at the seaside. There were many pairs of jeans: boot cut, straight leg,
flared, white denim, blue, black. He refused to bag a cream chiffon evening
gown she had worn at a dinner held in honour of Sir Patrick Moore, until she
pointed out the large red stain on the bodice, caused by Brian’s clumsiness
with his late-night cheese and beetroot sandwich.

Alexander said, ‘You’re too hasty, Mrs Beaver, my
sister’s a genius with dye and a sewing machine. That girl can create magic.’

Eva shrugged and said, ‘Do what you like with it.’

There were the Christian Dior evening shoes Brian
had bought for Eva with a tax rebate when they were visiting Paris for the
first time.

‘These are too good to throw away,’ said Alexander. ‘Look
at the stitching! Who made them? A gang of elves?’

Eva shuddered at the memory of having to wear a
basque and stockings and parade up and down in that filthy, freezing garret on
the Rive Gauche in her beautiful new shoes.

‘Perhaps I didn’t explain properly,’ she said. ‘All
of my possessions have got to go. I’m starting again.’

He said, ‘eBay.’ I think,’ and continued sorting.

‘No, give them to your sister.’

‘That’s too generous, Mrs Beaver. I’m not here to
take advantage of you.’

‘I want them to go to somebody who will appreciate
them.’

‘You don’t want a cut of the money?’

Eva said, ‘I don’t need money any more.

After Alexander had bagged up Brian’s mostly sludge-coloured
clothes and taken them on to the landing, the wardrobe was empty. He used an
electric screwdriver to take off the doors and the internal fittings.

They didn’t speak at first, because of the noise.

When it was quiet enough, she said, ‘I’m sorry I can’t
make you a cup of tea.’

‘Don’t worry. I only drink herbal tea. I’ve got a
flask.’

She said, ‘How did Brian get hold of you?’

‘Me and my kids walked the streets, posting flyers
through doors. You’re my first customer. I’m a painter —but nobody wants to buy
my pictures.’

Eva asked, ‘What kind of pictures do you paint?’

‘Landscapes. The Fens. Leicestershire. I love the
English countryside.’

She said, ‘I lived in the country when I was a girl.
Are there figures in your landscapes?’

‘I paint in the early morning,’ he said, ‘when there
is nobody about.’

‘To capture the light at dawn?’ Eva asked.

‘No ,’ Alexander said, ‘people get worried when they
see a black man in a field. I got to be well acquainted with the Leicestershire
police. Apparently, Jews don’t ski and black men don’t paint.’

Eva said, ‘What other skills have you got?’

‘Carpentry. The usual van-man skills — painting and
decorating, garden clearance, lugging stuff about. I speak fluent Italian and I
was a bad boy for ten years, a wanker banker.’

What happened?’

He laughed. ‘It was good for the first five years.
We lived in a big house in Islington, and I bought my mother a little house
with a garden back home in Leicester. She likes to grub around in the dirt. But
don’t ask me about the next five — I shoved too much stuff up my nose, my Smeg
was full of stupidly expensive fizz. I wasted it and wasted myself. I missed
the first five years of my kids growing up. I suppose I was dying — but nobody
noticed, because we all were. I worked for Goldman Sachs. My wife didn’t like
me any more.

We were going home in a car I’d only had for two
days. It was too big for me, too powerful. She started to nag that I hadn’t
seen the kids for over a week and that nobody worked sixteen hours a day.’ He
looked Eva in the face and said, ‘I did work sixteen hours a day. It was crazy.
I started to shout, she was screaming about my coke bill, I lost control, we
ran off the road and hit a tree — a not particularly tall, weedy-looking tree.
You wouldn’t have known she was dead. I ran home to Leicester with my kids.’

There was a long silence.

Then Eva said, ‘Please don’t tell me any more
unhappy stories.’

‘I don’t make a habit of it.” Alexander said. ‘If
you draw up a list of all the jobs you’d like me to do, I’ll price them up and
give you a quote. The only problem might be that I have to pick my kids up from
school …’ He paused. ‘Mrs Beaver, do you mind if I make an observation?
There’s no coherence in your clothes.’

Eva was indignant. ‘How can there be coherence when
I don’t know who I am? I sometimes wish we had to wear a uniform, like the
Chinese did during the Cultural Revolution. They didn’t have to worry and
dither over what to wear in the morning. They had a uniform —baggy trousers and
a tunic. That’s what I want.’

‘Mrs Beaver, I know we’ve only just met,’ said
Alexander, ‘but when you feel better, I’ll gladly go shopping with you, to
warn you off culottes and harem trousers and anything sleeveless.’

Eva laughed. ‘Thanks. But I’m staying here, in this
bed, for a year.’

A year?’

‘Yes.’

‘Why?’

‘I’ve got things to do. To sort out.’

Alexander sat down on the edge of the bed. Eva moved
along to give him more room. She studied his face with great pleasure. It
gleamed with health and the joy of living ‘He would make the world endurable
for some lucky woman,’ she thought. ‘But not for me.’ One of his dreadlocks
needed re-twisting. Eva took it automatically and was reminded of how she had
plaited Brianne’s hair every junior school morning. She had sent her off with
plaits and ribbons. And every afternoon Brianne had slouched out of school,
the ribbons lost, the plaits unravelled.

Alexander put a hand on Eva’s wrist to gently
restrain her. He said, ‘Mrs Beaver, you’d better not start something you can’t
finish.’

Eva let the dreadlock fall.

‘It takes more time than you think,’ he said,
softly. ‘I have to pick my kids up at four o’clock. They’re at a birthday
party.’

‘I still have that “time to pick up the kids” alarm
in my head,’ she said.

Later,
when the component parts of the wardrobe had been taken outside, Eva asked
Alexander how much she owed him.

He said, ‘Oh, give me fifty pounds, on top of what
your husband has already paid me for shifting that double bed.’

‘Double bed?’ checked Eva. ‘From where?’

‘From his shed.’

Eva said nothing, but raised her eyebrows.

He asked, ‘Do you want me to take the wood away? It’s
solid mahogany. I could make something out of it.’

‘Do what you like with it — set fire to it,
anything. ‘Before he left he asked, ‘Is there anything I can do to make you
more comfortable?’

For some reason, both he and Eva blushed. It was a
moment. She was fifty, but she was better-looking than she knew.

She said, ‘You could take the rest of the furniture
away for me.’

He said, ‘Everything?’

‘Everything. ‘Well …
arrivederci, Signora
.’

She
laughed when she heard the van starting up. She had been to a circus once and
the clown’s car had sounded very similar. She lay back on her pillows and
strained her ears until there was nothing else to hear.

The bedroom was huge now the wardrobe was gone. She
looked forward to seeing him again. She would ask him to bring some of his
paintings.

She was curious to know whether they were any good
or not.

15

Poppy
was sprawled on Brianne’s bed, applying black mascara to her stubby lashes.
Brianne was sitting at her desk, trying to complete an essay before the 2 p.m.
deadline. It was 1.47 p.m.

Poppy dropped the mascara brush and it rolled across
her white T-shirt. She growled, ‘Fucking fuckety fuck! Why don’t you buy a
decent fucking mascara?’ She gave a little laugh — she knew she couldn’t go too
far. She had very few friends left on her corridor. There had been incidents
concerning the theft of food and cigarettes.

Brianne was staring out of the window, trying to
find the final paragraph and equations to complete an essay her lecturers had
entitled ‘Infinity: An Endless Conversation?’ Her view from the window was of
identical accommodation blocks, young trees and rain clouds the colour of
gunmetal. She had been there for two weeks, and she still missed her mother.
She didn’t know how to make herself comfortable without all the small things
Eva had done for her for as long as she could remember.

Brianne said, ‘My mother bought me these cosmetics,
but I’ve never used them.’

‘You should,’ said Poppy. ‘You’re a proper minger.
It must piss you off big time that your brother is actually
beautiful.
How
cruel is
that?
Did nobody ever mention plastic surgery?’

Brianne’s hands froze on the keys of her laptop. She
knew she wasn’t pretty, but she hadn’t thought that she was an actual minger.

‘No,’ she said, ‘nobody has ever mentioned that I
need plastic surgery.’ Her eyes welled with tears.

‘Don’t go all emo on me. I believe in being cruel to
be kind.’ Poppy laid an arm across Brianne’s shoulders. ‘I’ll tell you what you
need.’

The essay deadline came and went while Poppy listed
the defects that were going to ruin Brianne’s future, unless she ‘went under
the knife’.

Poppy said, ‘No man gives a toss how
clever
a
woman is. Well, no man worth having. All they care about is what we look like.
How many guys have I slept with since the first day of uni?’

‘Loads,’ said Brianne. ‘Too many.’

‘Don’t be so fucking judgemental!’ shouted Poppy. ‘You
know I can’t sleep on my own — not since my body was violated by that monster.’

Brianne was not curious about the ‘monster’. She
knew he didn’t exist.

Poppy flung herself down on the bed and began to
wail like a Middle Eastern grandmother at a freshly dug grave.

Brianne had thought that she was only mildly fond of
her mother, but she desperately wanted to speak to her now. She went outside
into the corridor and phoned Eva’s mobile, but all she got was the dead tone.
She let herself into Brian Junior’s room.

He was sitting at his desk with his hands over his
ears and his eyes closed.

She said, ‘Mum’s phone is dead! I need to speak to
her about Poppy.’

Brian Junior opened his eyes and said, ‘I need Mum,
Bri. Poppy is pregnant, and she says I’m the father.’

The twins looked at each other, then leaned forward
and embraced.

They tried the house phone. It rang and rang and
rang and rang.

Brianne said, ‘Mum always answers the phone! We’ll
have to phone Dad, at work. Anyway, she can’t know if she’s pregnant, you only
met her a fortnight ago.’