The Woman Who Went to Bed for a Year (17 page)

The cleaner admitted that she did not.

Well, butt out then! My problem is entirely related
to my research, which I will now never complete. I’ve given my life to those
particles!’

As Mrs Hordern walked the corridor, pushing the floor-washing
machine in front of her, she thought, ‘Things are not right.’

When she passed the door labelled ‘Near-Earth
Objects’, Brian Beaver burst out and shouted, ‘For Christ’s sake, turn that
fucking machine off! We’re trying to think in here!’

Mrs Hordern said, ‘That may be so, but this floor’s not
going to clean itself, is it? No need to swear. I won’t have it at home, and I’m
not having it here!’

Brian retreated to his desk, where banks of computers
were displaying rapidly scrolling numbers and a flashing red trajectory that
intersected with a large spherical object. The room was crowded with people
silently watching the screens. Several of his colleagues jostled closer and
peered nervously over his shoulder as his fingers flew across the keyboard.

Leather Trousers said, ‘It might be good if you
checked your Australian data again, Dr Beaver, before the eyes of the world are
upon us. It’s kinda important that we get this right.’

Brian said, ‘I’m almost certain. But the computer
models don’t all agree.’

‘Almost!’ bellowed Leather Trousers. ‘Do we wake the
Prime Minister, the Secretary General of the United Nations and the President
of the United States and tell them that we’re
almost
certain that the
earth is fucked?’

Brian explained pedantically, ‘You don’t wake the
President. The call will go to the NASA Political Liaison officer in
Washington.’ Then he continued weakly, ‘It could be that the metadata from the
star maps is corrupted. We’ve always known that our database integration was
potentially suspect. And I trusted Dr Abbot’s interpolation techniques —’

Leather Trousers shouted, ‘And where is she when we
need her? On fucking maternity leave up her precious Welsh mountain, suckling
that moon-faced dribbler, with no landline, no mobile signal, and the most
high-tech thing she’s got in that mould-filled hovel she calls a cottage is a
fucking Dualit toaster! Get hold of the leek-muncher!’

Several
hours later, when Mrs Hordern passed the office again with the electric
polishing machine, she looked in warily through the half-open door and saw a
small crowd of people laughing and shaking hands. The scene reminded her of
Skippy, the television kangaroo, when he and his human friends had overcome
their difficulties at the end of each episode.

Brian was sitting apart, with his hands linked
together, staring down at the floor.

As
Mrs Hordern left work, she passed Wayne Tonkin. He was polishing his new sit-on
lawnmower.

He stopped and said, ‘So, the world ain’t finishin’
next week. Dickhead Beaver got his sums wrong. That asteroid’s gonna miss us
by twenty-seven million miles.’

‘I was sort of looking forward to there being no
Christmas,’ said Mrs Hordern. ‘It’s such hard work. No bugger lifts a finger in
my house, ‘part from me.’

Wayne rolled his eyes and turned the lawnmower
engine on. He was longing to use it, but the bastard weather wouldn’t let him
for a few months yet.

27

Brian
Junior and Brianne were not quite sure how Poppy came to be in their dad’s car
when he drove them back from Leeds to Leicester for the Christmas holiday. Neither
of them wanted her in the car, or in their house, and the prospect of spending
four weeks with her appalled and horrified them both.

Poppy had been told that Brian was expected and she
hung about in the lobby downstairs, waiting to introduce herself to him. She
had overheard the twins laughing about their father’s abysmal dress sense — and
she had seen a photograph she knew to be Dr Beaver, in which his face was
lurking behind a straggling black beard — so she knew what to look for. Several
likely candidates walked through the lobby before Dr Beaver appeared.

When Brian pressed the button to summon the groaning
lift, Poppy slipped in beside him and said, ‘This lift’s awfully slow. I
sometimes think that I’m in a Samuel Beckett play.’

Brian laughed. He had played Lucky in a student production
of
Waiting for Godot
and had won praise for his ‘frenetic energy’.

While they slowly ascended to the sixth floor, Poppy
told Brian that her parents were in a coma at Ninewells Hospital in Dundee. It
was the first time she would be alone at Christmas, she told him.

Brian thought she might cry. His heart went out to
her.

Poppy had a quick flash of memory. It was the
Ninewells Hospital Wikipedia page. She gave him a big brave smile and said, ‘But
Mum and Dad are lucky, in a way. They’re in the first Frank Gehry building in
Britain. Bob Geldof opened it. I can’t wait to tell them.., when they wake up.’

‘Yeah, I like Gehry’s work,’ said Brian. ‘Very space
age. It’s much like the module we intend to build, well, on the moon.’ When she
asked him what he did for a living, he said, ‘I’m Dr Brian Beaver, I’m an
astronomer. ‘Poppy squealed and clapped her hands together.

‘Wow!’ she said. ‘That’s what I want to be! What an
amazing coincidence!’

Brian agreed, and said, ‘It is, indeed, amazing.’

Then she slapped her hand over her mouth and said, ‘OMG!
You must be Brianne’s dad, he’s an astronomer!’

‘Guilty as charged,’ said Brian. He thought Poppy
was a sweetheart, enchanting, with her wild hair and pale skin. Her sinewy,
exotic sexuality diverted him from asking any further questions about her
unlikely astronomical aspirations.

‘So, what will you do for Christmas?’ he asked. ‘Where
will you go?’

‘Oh, I’ll just stay here and go out for walks. I’ve
no money. I’ve spent it all visiting Mum and Dad,’ she explained, wistfully.

There was a companionable silence for a moment.

‘So, you know Brianne?’

‘Know her? We’re the best of friends. I can’t bear
the thought of being apart from her for four whole weeks.’

She smiled bravely, but Brian could see that the
poor kid was crying inside. He didn’t take long to decide. When they got out of
the lift, he told her to pack a bag and gave her his car keys.

‘When you’re ready, go and sit in the silver Peugeot
Estate. It’ll be a fantastic surprise for the twins.’

Poppy fell on his neck, uttering thanks and other
appreciative sounds that were not quite words.

Brian held her tight, laughing at first, but as she
continued her iron grip around his neck he began to take notice of her young,
firm flesh and the musky perfume she wore. He instructed himself to think about
the gristly meat he had been forced to swallow at school dinners — it usually
did the trick.

The
twins travelled down in the lift, leaving their father to use Brian Junior’s
en-suite lavatory in preparation for the hundred-mile journey back to
Leicester.

Brianne said, ‘Four weeks without that crazy cow.’

Brian Junior smiled one of his rare smiles. Before
the lift door opened, they unsuccessfully executed a high five.

Brianne said, ‘Brian Junior, you never get the
timing
right! How many have we practised? You must be hopeless in bed. You have
absolutely no sense of rhythm.’

‘I had enough to impregnate Poppy.’

‘You can’t make a woman pregnant if you keep your underpants
on and don’t get an erection.’

‘I know
that!
I also know that if you don’t
let the sperm out, your balls explode.’

They left the warmth of the building and emerged
into a confluence of harsh winds and snow flurries. They approached their
father’s car and saw somebody sitting in the front passenger seat.

As they neared the car the front passenger door
opened, and Poppy shouted, ‘Surprise!’

The
journey was horrible.

The boot was full of Poppy’s suitcases and black bin
liners bulging with her mad clothes and customised boots and shoes. Brianne and
Brian Junior sat uncomfortably with their own luggage jammed in around them.

Poppy talked all the way from Leeds to Leicester. If
he hadn’t been driving, Brian would have sat at her feet —as if she were Homer
and wise beyond her years.

He thought, ‘She’s the daughter I should have had, a
girl whose shoe size is smaller than mine. Who takes forever in the bathroom,
titivating herself— unlike Brianne, who sounds like a grunting pig when she
washes her face and is out of the bathroom in two minutes.’

Brian Junior thought about the tadpole baby inside
Poppy’s womb. He couldn’t remember what had happened on the night she came
into his bed. The images he summoned up were a tangle of arms and legs and heat
and a fish-finger smell, the clash of teeth, of rapid breathing, and an
unimaginably wonderful feeling of falling away out of his mortal body and into
an unexpected universe.

Brianne wanted to rid the world of Poppy, and spent
the journey planning in detail how it could be done.

As they turned off the motorway at junction 21 Brian
tried to prepare the twins for the ‘changes in our domestic arrangements’.

He told them, ‘Mum’s been a bit off colour.’

‘Is that why she hasn’t phoned us for three months?’
said Brianne bitterly.

Poppy turned her head and said, ‘That’s shocking — a
mother not ringing her children.’

Brian said, ‘You’re right, Poppy.’

Brian Junior said to Brianne, ‘We could have kept
trying.’

28

Eva
was longing to hold the twins in her arms, especially since she wouldn’t have
to clean their rooms or put clean sheets on their beds, and somebody else would
be responsible for their meals and buying their Christmas presents. And perhaps
it was Brian’s turn to be irritated by their sloth and mess.

‘Yes,’ she thought. ‘Yes, let somebody else grovel
under their beds and retrieve the cereal bowls with the dried-on milk and
sugar, and the mugs and plates. The brown apple cores, dried banana peel and
the dirty socks.’ She laughed out loud in her pure, white room.

Brianne
and Brian Junior were shocked when they saw their mother sitting up in bed in
the white box that used to be their parents’ bedroom. Eva held her arms wide
open, and the twins shuffled into them.

She could not speak. She was overcome with the pleasure
of holding them, of feeling their bodies — which had perceptibly changed in the
three months since she had last seen them.

Brianne needed her hair cutting. Eva thought, ‘I’ll
give her sixty quid, so she can go somewhere decent.’

Brian Junior was agitated — Eva could feel the
tightening of his muscles — and unusually he had allowed several days’ worth
of stubble to grow on his face, which she thought made him resemble a blond
Orlando Bloom. However, Brianne’s black facial hair cried out for a waxing
appointment.

They pulled away from her and sat awkwardly on the
edge of the bed.

Eva said, ‘Well, tell me everything. Are you happy
at Leeds?’

The twins looked at each other, and Brianne said, ‘We
are, apart from —Eva heard somebody downstairs exclaim, ‘Wow, I already feel at
home!’

The twins exchanged another look, and they got up
and hurried out.

Brian shouted upstairs, ‘Twins, help me with this
luggage!’

There was a thundering of footsteps on the stairs
and landing, and then a strange-looking girl in a tatty cocktail dress, which
she wore with an old man’s dressing gown, the cord of which she had wound
around her head Gaddafi-style, threw herself into Eva’s arms. Eva patted her
back and shoulders and noticed that the girl’s white bra straps were filthy.

‘Bob Geldof has been keeping a twenty-four-hour
vigil at the side of my parents’ beds,’ announced the extraordinary girl.

Eva asked, ‘Why?’

‘You don’t know?’ the girl said. ‘I’m Poppy. I’m Brianne
and Brian Junior’s best friend.’

Eva could hear Brian Junior and Brianne grunting as they
staggered up the stairs with Poppy’s luggage, and was startled when Poppy
shouted, ‘I hope that’s not my luggage you’re throwing about. There are
precious objets d’art in those cases.’ She got up from Eva’s bed and went into
the bathroom, where she left the door ajar.

A few seconds later, Eva heard Poppy’s one-sided
conversation.

‘Hello, Peaches Ward, please.’

Silence.

‘Hello, is that Sister Cooke?’

Silence.

‘I’m very well. I’m staying with friends in the
country.’

Silence.

‘How are Mum and Dad?’