The Woman Who Went to Bed for a Year (3 page)

Brianne said, ‘I think it’s because he’s sad we’ve
left home.’

Brian Junior was amazed. ‘And is that a normal response?’

‘I think so.’

‘Mum didn’t cry when we said goodbye.’

‘No, Mum thinks tears should be reserved for nothing
less than tragedy.’

They had waited by the lift for a few moments to see
if it would return their father again. When it did not, they went to their
rooms and tried, but failed, to contact their mother.

3

At
ten o’clock Brian Senior came into the bedroom and started to get undressed.

Eva closed her eyes. She heard his pyjama drawer
open and close. She gave him a minute to climb into his pyjamas and then, with
her back turned to him, she said, ‘Brian.’ I don’t want you to sleep in this
bed tonight. Why don’t you sleep in Brian Junior’s room? It’s guaranteed to be
clean, neat and unnaturally tidy.’

‘Are you feeling poorly?’ Brian asked. ‘Physically?’
he added.

‘No,’ she said, ‘I’m fine.’

Brian lectured, ‘Did you know, Eva, that in certain
therapeutic communities, patients are banned from using the words, “I’m fine.”?
Because invariably, they are
not
fine. Admit it.’ you’re distraught because
the twins have left home.’

‘No, I’m glad to see the back of them.’

Brian’s voice trembled with anger. ‘That’s a very
wicked thing for a mother to say.’

Eva turned over and looked at him. We made a pig’s
ear of bringing them up,’ she said. ‘Brianne lets people walk all over her, and
Brian Junior panics if he has to talk to another human.’

Brian sat on the edge of the bed. ‘They’re sensitive
children, I’ll give you that.’

‘Neurotic is the word,’ Eva said. ‘They spent their
early years sitting inside a cardboard box for hours at a time.’

Brian said, ‘I didn’t know that! What were they
doing?’

‘Just sitting there in silence,’ Eva replied. ‘Occasionally
they would turn and look at each other. If I tried to take them out of the box
they would bite and scratch. They wanted to be together in their own box-world.’

‘They’re gifted children.’

‘But are they happy.’ Brian? I can’t tell.’ I love
them too much.’

Brian went to the door and stood there for a while,
as though he were about to say something more. Eva hoped that he wouldn’t make
any kind of dramatic statement. She was already worn out by the strong emotion
of the day. Brian opened his mouth, then evidently changed his mind, because he
went out and closed the door quietly.

Eva sat up in bed, peeled the duvet away and was
shocked to see that she was still wearing her black high heels. She looked at
her bedside table, which was crowded with almost identical pots and tubes of
moisturising cream. ‘I only need one,’ she thought. She chose the Chanel and
threw the others one by one into the waste-paper basket on the far side of the
room. She was a good thrower. She had represented Leicester High School for
Girls in the javelin at the County Games.

When her Classics teacher had congratulated her on
setting the new school record, he had murmured, ‘You’re quite an Athena, Miss
Brown-Bird. And by the way, you’re a smashing-looking girl.’

Now she needed the lavatory. She was glad that she
had persuaded Brian to knock through into the box room and create an en-suite
bathroom and toilet. They were the last in their street of Edwardian houses to
do so.

The Beavers’ house had been built in 1908. It stated
so under the eaves. The Edwardian numbers were surrounded by a stone frieze of
stylised ivy and sweet woodbine. There are a few house buyers who choose their
next property for purely romantic reasons, and Eva was such a person. Her
father had smoked Woodbine cigarettes and the green packet, decorated with wild
woodbine, was a fixture of her childhood. Luckily, the house had been lived in
by a modern-day Ebenezer Scrooge who had resisted the 1960s hysteria to modernise.
It was intact, with spacious rooms, high ceilings, mouldings, fireplaces and
solid oak doors and floors.

Brian hated it. He wanted a ‘machine for living’. He
imagined himself in a sleek white kitchen waiting by the espresso machine for
his morning coffee. He did not want to live a mile from the city centre. He
wanted a Le Corbusier-style glass and steel box with rural views and a big sky.
He had explained to the estate agent that he was an astronomer and that his
telescopes would not cope with light pollution. The estate agent had looked at
Brian and Eva and been mystified as to how two such extremes of personality and
taste could have married in the first place.

Eventually, Eva had informed Brian that she could not
live in a minimalist modular system, far away from street lighting, and that
she had to live in a house. Brian had countered that he did not want to live in
an old pile in which people had died, with bedbugs, fleas, rats and mice. When
he first viewed the Edwardian house, he’d complained that he could feel a ‘century
of dust clogging my lungs’.

Eva liked the fact that the house was opposite
another road. Through the large, handsome windows she could see the tall
buildings of the city centre and, beyond that, woodland and the open
countryside, with hills in the far distance.

At last, due to the extreme shortage of modernist
living quarters in rural Leicestershire, they had bought the detached Edwardian
villa at 15 Bowling Green Road for £46,999. Brian and Eva took possession in
April 1986 after three years of living with Yvonne, Brian’s mother. Eva had
never regretted standing up to Brian and Yvonne about the house. It had been
worth enduring the three weeks of sulking that followed.

When she turned the light on in the bathroom, she
was confronted by myriad images of herself. A thin, early-middle-aged woman
with cropped blonde hair, high cheekbones and French-grey eyes. At her
instruction —she thought it would make the room appear larger — the builder had
installed large mirrors on three sides of the room. Almost immediately she had
wanted to tell him to take most of them away, but hadn’t had the courage. So,
whenever she sat down on the lavatory she could see herself ad infinitum.

She removed her clothes and stepped into the shower,
avoiding the mirrors.

Her mother had said to her recently, ‘No wonder you’ve
got no flesh on your bones, you never sit down. You even eat your dinner
standing up.’

This was true. After she had served Brian, Brian Junior
and Brianne, she would go back to the stove and pick at the meat and vegetables
in their respective saucepans and roasting tins. Anxiety about cooking a meal,
taking it to the table on time, keeping it hot and hoping that the conversation
around the table would not be too contentious, seemed to produce a surge of
stomach acid that made food dull and tasteless to her.

The wire shelf unit in the corner of the shower was
a jumble of shampoos, conditioners and shower gels. Eva spent a few moments
selecting her favourites and threw the rejects into the bin next to the sink.
Then she dressed quickly and put on her high-heeled court shoes. They gave her
an extra three and a half inches in height, and she needed to feel powerful
tonight. She strode around the room, rehearsing what she was going to say to
Brian if he came back and tried to get into their bed.

She would have to act quickly, before she lost her
nerve.

She would bring up how he undermined her in public.’
the way he introduced her to his friends by saying, ‘And this is the Klingon.’
How he had bought her twenty-five pounds’ worth of lottery tickets for her last
birthday.

But then she thought about how quickly his bombast
deflated, and how sad he had looked when she had asked him to sleep somewhere
else. She stood near the bedroom door for a few moments, thinking through the
consequences, then climbed back into bed, withdrawing from the potential
battle.

She
was startled awake at 3.1 5 a.m. by Brian screaming and fighting the duvet. His
bedside light snapped on. When her eyes focused on her surroundings, she saw
Brian stamping his foot on the carpet and holding his right calf.

‘Cramp?’ she said.

‘Not cramp! Your fucking high heels! You’ve kicked a
hole in my bloody leg!’

‘You should have stayed in Brian Junior’s room and
not come sneaking back into mine.’

Brian said, ‘Your room? It used to be
ours.’

Brian was not good with pain or blood and here he
was in the early hours of the morning, with both. He began to wail. When Eva
had orientated herself.’ she could see that there actually was a hole in his
leg.

‘A lot of blood … wash the wound clean,’ he said. ‘You’ll
have to bathe it with distilled water and iodine.’

Eva could not leave the bed. Instead, she reached
over and plucked the bottle of Chanel No. 5 off her bedside table. She pointed
the nozzle at Brian’s wound and pressed, keeping her finger on the spray
mechanism. Brian squealed, hopped across the beige carpet and out of the door.

She had done the right thing, Eva thought, as she
drifted back off to sleep. Everybody knows that Chanel No. 5 is a good
antiseptic in an emergency.

At
about five thirty Eva was woken again.

Brian was limping around the bedroom.’ yelling, ‘The
pain! The pain!’ at regular intervals. When Eva sat up, Brian said, ‘I phoned
NHS Direct. They employ morons! Idiots! Plonkers! Fools! Halfwits! Dingbats!
Cretins! Hamburger flippers! Pond life! An African witch doctor would have been
better informed!’

Eva said wearily, ‘Brian,
please.
Don’t you
get tired of fighting the world?’

‘No, I don’t much like the world.’

Eva felt a terrible pity for her husband as he stood
at the end of the bed, naked, with a white linen napkin tied around one leg and
with toast crumbs in his beard. Eva turned away from him.

He was an intrusion in what was now her bedroom.

Brianne
wondered how long Poppy would be crying. She could hear her sobbing through the
party wall.

She looked at the alarm clock she had owned since
she was a child. Barbie was pointing to the four and Ken was indicating the
one. It wasn’t what she had expected from her first night at university.

She thought, ‘I’ve been dragged into the pages of an
EastEnders
script by that awful girl.’

At about half past five she was startled awake from
a ragged sleep by somebody banging on her door. She could hear Poppy whimpering
She froze. There was no escape from her on the sixth floor of the accommodation
block — and anyway, the window only opened a few inches.

‘It’s me — Poppy. Let me in?’

Brianne shouted, ‘No! Go to sleep, Poppy!’

Poppy beseeched, ‘Brianne, help me! I’ve been
attacked by a man with one eye!’

Brianne opened her door and Poppy fell into the
room. ‘I’ve been attacked!’

Brianne took a look up and down the corridor. It was
empty. The door to Poppy’s room was open and the emo track that she played
incessantly — A Fine Frenzy’s ‘Almost Lover’ — was blaring out. She glanced
into Poppy’s room. There was no sign of a violent struggle. The bedcover was
unwrinkled.

When she returned to her own room, she was disconcerted
to find that Poppy was wearing her favourite fluffy acrylic dressing gown, had
climbed under her duvet and was sobbing into her pillow Brianne didn’t know
what to do, so she put the kettle on and asked, ‘Shall I phone the police?’

‘Don’t you think I’ve been defiled enough?’ shouted
Poppy. ‘I’ll just sleep in your bed tonight, with you.’

Thirty minutes later, Brianne was clinging on to the
edge of the bed. She vowed to go to the university library tomorrow and source
a book on how to grow a backbone.

4

On
the second day Eva woke and threw the duvet back and sat on the side of the
bed.

Then she remembered that she didn’t have to get up
and make breakfast for anyone, yell at anyone else to get up, empty the
dishwasher or fill the washing machine, iron a pile of laundry, drag a vacuum
cleaner up the stairs or sort cupboards and drawers.’ clean the oven or wipe
various surfaces, including the necks of the brown and the red sauce bottles,
polish the wooden furniture, clean the windows or mop the floors, straighten
rugs and cushions, shove a brush down various shitty toilets or pick up soiled
clothing and place it in a laundry basket, replace light bulbs and toilet
rolls, pick up things from downstairs that were upstairs and bring them down or
pick up things from upstairs that were downstairs, fetch dry-cleaning, weed the
borders, visit garden centres to buy bulbs and annuals, polish shoes or take
them to the key cutter, return library books, sort recycling, pay paper bills,
visit one mother and worry about not visiting one mother-in-law, feed the fish
and clean out the filter, answer the phone for two teenagers and pass on messages,
shave legs or pluck eyebrows, give self-manicure, change the sheets and pillow
cases on three beds (if it was Saturday), hand wash woollen jumpers and dry
flat on a bath towel, pay bills, shop for food she wouldn’t eat herself, wheel
it to the car, unload it into the boot, drive home, put the food away in the
fridge and the cupboards and, on tiptoe, place tins and dried goods on a shelf
that exceeded her reach but was perfectly comfortable for Brian.