The Woman Who Went to Bed for a Year (24 page)

Brian Junior laughed out loud and said in a bad
American accent, ‘Fuck it, dude, let’s go bowling.’

His family had never heard Brian Junior swear
before. Eva was pleased at this proof that Brian Junior could be a normal
foul-mouthed teenager.

Brianne turned to her brother. ‘Bri, no Lebowski,
please. This is serious business.’

Alexander said, ‘I’ve got a social worker’s report
here. When she was three and a half, Paula was temporarily taken into care and
fostered.’

A stillness settled over the room.

Eva looked up from her printouts. ‘I’ve got an admission
report for University Hospital, on the 11th of June 1995, and a six-month
review written by her social worker, Delfina Ladzinski.’ Eva scanned the
papers. Where do I start?’ She cleared her throat and read out what she thought
were the most important details, as though she were reading the shipping
forecast.

‘Medical assessment on being taken into care: cigarette
burns on the backs of her hands and forearms, head lice, infected fleabites,
impetigo. She was malnourished, unable to speak. Afraid to use the toilet. It’s
hardly Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm, is it?’

Yvonne got up. ‘Well, I don’t know about anyone
else, but I’ve had enough of this. It’s Boxing Day. I want some turkey
sandwiches and a game of Mr Potato Head, not all this wallowing in the gutter.’

Ruby said, ‘Sit down, Yvonne! There are some things
that have to be faced full on. I’ve got a report here from Thames Valley
Police, about an arson attack on a children’s home in Reading. Paula Gibb was
questioned but said she’d only been trying to light a cigarette using a Zip
firelighter. She’d panicked and thrown the firelighter into the Activities
Room, where it landed in the middle of the pool table —’

Yvonne interrupted. ‘All this is making me poorly.’

Eva said, ‘It explains everything.’

Stanley insisted, ‘But none of that excuses her
current behaviour.’

Alexander nodded. ‘My mum used to leave me locked in
my room in the dark. I don’t know where she went. She ordered me to keep clear
of the window and told me that if I cried she would send me away, so I did as I
was told. But
The
done OK.’

He looked up to find Eva gazing back at him with a
fierce look in her eyes, as if she were seeing him for the first time.

Yvonne said, miserably, ‘If I’d known there was a
deranged person staying here — well, another deranged person — I would never
have come.’

Eva countered, ‘I’m not deranged, Yvonne. Can I
remind you that your son, my husband, is downstairs arguing with his mistress?’

Yvonne looked down and straightened the rings on her
arthritic fingers.

Brian Junior said, ‘I’ve got her GCSE and A level
certificates here. She got twelve GCSEs, nothing below a C grade, but only two
A levels — an A in English, and an A* in Religious Studies.’

‘So, she’s not just a psychopath,’ Alexander said, ‘she’s
quite
a clever psychopath. Now that is frightening.’

They all jumped and stared at the bedroom door as
they heard the front door slam, followed by the familiar clump of Poppy’s boots
in the hall.

Eva said, ‘I want to talk to her. Brian Junior, will
you ask her to come up here, please?’

‘Why me, why do I have to go? I don’t want to speak
to her. I don’t want to look at her. I don’t want to breathe the same air as
her.’

Everybody looked at everybody else, but nobody
moved.

Alexander said, ‘I’ll go.’

He went downstairs and eventually found her pretending
to be asleep on the sofa in the sitting room, covered in a red blanket. She
didn’t open her eyes, but Alexander could see by the flickering of her eyelids
that she wasn’t really asleep.

He said, loudly, ‘Eva wants to see you,’ then
watched her impersonating someone waking up. He felt a mixture of pity and
contempt for her.

Poppy/Paula exclaimed, ‘I must have fallen asleep!
It was an exhausting morning. Everybody at the shelter wanted a little bit of
Poppy time.’

Alexander said, ‘Well, now Eva wants a little bit of
Poppy time.’

When
they walked into Eva’s bedroom, Poppy was met by a room full of accusatory
faces. But she’d been in similar situations many times before. ‘Style it out,
girl,’ she said to herself.

Eva patted the side of the bed and said, ‘Sit here,
Paula. You don’t have to lie any more. We know who you are. We know your
parents are alive.’ She held up a piece of paper. ‘It says here that your
mother went to the Department of Work and Pensions on the 22nd of December, and
asked for a crisis loan, claiming that she had no money for Christmas. Your
mother
is
Claire Theresa Maria Gibb, isn’t she? Incidentally, are you
Poppy or Paula?’

‘Poppy,’ the girl said, with a crooked nervous
smile. ‘Please, don’t call me Paula. Please. Don’t call me Paula. I gave myself
a new name. Don’t call me Paula.’

Eva took her hand and said, ‘OK. You’re Poppy. Why
don’t you try to be yourself?’

Poppy’s first instinct was to pretend to cry, and
sob, ‘But I don’t
know
who I am!’ Then she became curious: who
was
she?
She would try to drop the little-girl voice, she thought. When she looked at
the fraying 1950s evening dress she was wearing, it suddenly didn’t seem as
charmingly eccentric as vintage clothes did on Helena Bonham Carter. And her
big boots, with the carefully loosened laces, no longer gave her ‘character’.
She shifted the gears in her brain into neutral and waited a few seconds to
see where this would take her. She said, testing her new voice, ‘Can I stay
until uni starts, please?’

Brianne and Brian Junior said, in unison, ‘No!’

Eva said, ‘Yes, you can stay until term starts. But
these are the house rules. One, no more lies.’

Poppy repeated, ‘No more lies.’

‘Two, no more lounging on the sofa in your underwear.
And three, no more stealing.’

Brianne said, ‘I found our egg timer in her bag last
night.’

Poppy sat down next to Alexander, who said, ‘You’ve
been given a great chance. Don’t fuck it up.’

Brianne said, ‘So, that’s it, is it? She’s forgiven,
is she?’

‘Yes,’ said Eva. ‘Just like I’ve forgiven Dad.’

Stanley raised his hand and asked, ‘May
I
say
something?’ He looked at Poppy. ‘I’m not a very forgiving person, and I cannot
tell you how angry and distressed I am about your swastika tattoo. It has been
preying on my mind. I know you are young, but you must have studied modern
history and be fully aware that the swastika symbolises a great evil. And
please don’t tell me that your fascist tattoo represents a Hindu god, or some
such nonsense. You and I know that you chose a swastika either because you’re a
Nazi, or because you wanted to boast about your alienation from our mostly
decent society in order to shock. You could have chosen a snake, a flower, a
bluebird, but you chose the swastika. I have in my house a collection of videos
which chart the progress of the Second World War. One of those videos shows the
liberation of Belsen, the concentration camp. Have you heard of Belsen?’

‘It’s where Anne Frank died. I did her for GCSE.’

Stanley continued, ‘When the Allied troops arrived
to free the prisoners, they found skeletal creatures barely alive, pleading for
food and water. A large pit was discovered, full of dead bodies. Horrifically,
some poor wretches were still alive. A bulldozer —’

Ruby shouted, ‘No more, Stanley!’

‘I apologise, I didn’t want to upset …’ He turned
back to Poppy. ‘If you would like to see the video, you are welcome to come and
sit with me, and we will watch it together.’

Poppy shook her head.

There was silence.

Eventually, Poppy said, ‘I’ll have it removed,
lasered off. I adore Anne Frank. I forgot she was a Jew I cried when the Nazis
found her in the attic. I only had a swastika tattoo when I was fourteen
because I was infatuated with a boy who loved Hitler. He had a suitcase under
his bed, full of daggers and medals and stuff. He told me that Hitler was an
animal lover and a vegetarian, and he only wanted to bring peace to the world.
When we were in his bedroom, his rule was that we called each other Adolf and
Eva.’

Everybody looked at Eva, who said, ‘Blame my mother.’

Ruby said indignantly, ‘You’re named after the film
star. Eva Marie Saint.’

‘He went off me after two months,’ said Poppy, ‘but
the tattoo stayed.’

Stanley nodded. ‘I shan’t speak of it again.’ He
gave a little cough, which acted as a punctuation mark, then turned to Ruby and
said, ‘Ah, Eva Marie Saint. The scene with Marlon Brando. The swing, the glove,
her lovely face.’

The conversation had turned.

Alexander
was the last to leave Eva’s room.

‘If you need me, ring,’ he said, ‘and I’ll come
running.’ When he had gone, Eva could not get the words of the song out of her
head. She started to sing it quietly, to herself. Winter, spring, summer or
fall …’

In
the middle of the night, when the rest of the household were asleep, Poppy
crept into Eva’s room. The walls were illuminated by the full moon, and it was
by this light that Poppy climbed into the bed.

Eva stirred but did not wake.

Poppy laid her face against Eva’s shoulder, and put
her arm around Eva’s waist.

In the morning, Eva felt the presence of another
person. But when she turned to look, she saw only a depression in the pillow.

36

Mr
Lin was excited when he saw Ho’s handwriting on a letter he had picked up from
his district post office in the Beijing suburbs. Perhaps Ho was writing to
express holiday greetings. Mr Lin knew that in England people celebrated the
birth of Jesus Christ — who, he had been told, was not only the son of their
God, but had also been a revolutionary communist who was tortured and executed
by the authorities.

He thought he would wait until he got home to open
the letter. Or perhaps he would hand it to his wife and see the pleasure on her
face. They both missed their child. It had been a difficult decision to send Ho
to England, but they did not want him to be a factory worker like themselves.
They wanted Ho to be a plastic surgeon and make a great deal of money. Young
Chinese women across the world were growing ashamed of their oval eyes and
small breasts.

Mr Lin stopped at a stall to buy a live chicken. He
selected one that would provide meat for several days, paid for it and then
carried it upside down to the vegetable and fruit market, where he bought a
gift pack of holy apples as a present for his wife. The apples cost five times
as much as ordinary apples, but Mr Lin liked his wife very much indeed. She hardly
ever quarrelled with him, her hair was still black and her face had few lines.
The only time she was sad was when she spoke about the daughter they could
never have.

He reached the playground, which lay at the foot of
the tower block where he and his wife lived on the twenty-seventh floor. He
looked up and located their window He hoped the lift was still working.

When
he arrived home, panting and breathless, his wife rose from her chair and came
to greet him.

He said, ‘See who is writing to us,’ and handed her
Ho’s letter.

She smiled with delight and touched the colourful
red, green and gold nativity stamp as though it were a precious artefact. ‘It
is the birth of their Jesus,’ she said.

The chicken squawked and struggled to be free. Mr Ho
took it into the tiny kitchen and threw it into the sink. Then he and his wife
sat down together, facing each other at the small table. Mrs Ho lay the letter
down between them.

Mr Ho took the holy apples out of the plastic bag
and placed them next to Ho’s letter.

His wife smiled with delight.

He said, ‘They are for you.’

She cried, ‘But I have not bought you anything!’

‘No need, you gave me Ho. You open the letter.’

She opened it slowly and carefully, and scanned the
first few lines. Then she paused and her face became stone. She pushed it
across the table and said, ‘You must be strong, husband.’

Mr Lin gave several cries as he read through the
document. When he came to the end, he said, ‘I have never liked the Poppy
flower. It is vulgar and it spreads its seeds too easily.’

The chicken squawked.

Mr Lin got up, took a sharp knife and a wooden
block, and quickly severed the chicken’s neck. He threw it back into the sink
and watched the bright blood gush down the plughole.

37

On
New Year’s Eve a stranger, a woman, called at the door and asked to speak to
Eva.