The Woman Who Went to Bed for a Year (39 page)

Brianne smiled and said, ‘So, we stick together for
life?’

Brian Junior agreed. ‘You’re the only person I can
stand to be with for more than four minutes.’

When they had tried their new clothes on, they came
out of their respective changing rooms and were astonished at how similar they
could look. They were both wearing black and, after a few negotiations, and
going back and forth to the rails, they ended up with a uniform. It was all
black apart from a leopard-skin belt and the silver accessories on their black
cowboy boots.

Mindful of their new and certain future wealth, they
left their old clothes in the changing room. As they walked arm in arm through
the shopping centre, they began to work on synchronising their steps.

A colourist at Toni & Guy obeyed their
instructions and dyed their hair magenta red. After a stylist had given them
both a severe geometric cut, they left the salon and headed to the best tattoo
parlour in South Yorkshire.

When the operative asked them if they were related
to the woman in the bed called Beaver, they responded, ‘No.’

He was disappointed. ‘She’s cool,’ he said.

They were given a rudimentary test for allergies
and, while they waited for the results, they sat outside a coffee bar so they
could smoke. Nihilists like them felt it was their duty to smoke.

They lit their cigarettes and smoked contentedly before
Brian Junior said, ‘Will we ever go back to Bowling Green Road, Brianne?’

What, and have to interface with those awful people
we used to call Mum and Dad? Or, as we now know them, The Great Adulterer and
his wife, The False Prophet.’

Brian Junior said, ‘I used to love them when I was
little — and you did too, Brianne, you can’t deny it!’

‘Little kids are idiots, they believe in the fucking
Tooth Fairy, Santa, God!’

‘I believed in them,’ lamented Brian Junior. ‘I
believed they’d always do the right thing. Tell the truth. Control their animal
desires.’

Brianne laughed. ‘Animal desires? You’ve either been
reading the Old Testament or D. H. Lawrence.’

Brian Junior said, ‘Disneyland hurts me. The thought
that while we were queuing with Mum for the It’s a Small World ride, Dad was
back at the hotel paying for a prostitute with his credit card.’

Brianne said, ‘We’ll say a final farewell to them,
shall we?’

Neither of them had a piece of paper. Who used the
stuff these days? Together they erased every parental reference from their
laptops. Then, Brianne put a virtual fire on screen, and typed in ‘Eva Beaver’
and ‘Brian Beaver’. Brian Junior put his index finger on top of Brianne’s, and
together they pressed the key that would cause their parents’ names to burn,
and eradicate their memory for all time.

They discussed the tattoo they would each have.

It would be two halves of an equation that together
made one perfect sum.

After they left the tattoo studio, they attracted a
great deal of attention — but nobody, not even the lowlife who hung around town
in the middle of the day, dared to comment.

Brian Junior drew strength and confidence from his
sister. In the past, he had walked down the street with his gaze on the
pavement. Now he stared straight ahead and people moved away, out of his path.

57

Eva
had watched the leaves of the sycamore unfurl. For the first time, it was
possible to have the window open. She was on her back doing exercises on her
bed, slowly raising two legs until she could feel her abdomen tightening. She
could tell that Alexander was on the door from the wisps of cigarette smoke
drifting up through the open window.

She had heard him arguing with Venus and Thomas
earlier that morning. Neither of them knew where their school shoes were. Eva
had laughed when she heard Alexander ask, ‘Where did you put them last?’

He was following the unofficial parents’ script, she
thought.

For how many thousands of years had children been
asked the same question? When did children start to wear shoes, and what were
they made of? Animal skin, or woven vegetation?

There were so many things she didn’t know.

She had also heard Alexander say, ‘Finish your food,
there are children starving in Africa.’

It had been Chinese children starving when she was a
girl, thought Eva.

He had answered Thomas’s question, ‘Why do children
have to go to school?’ with the terse reply, ‘Because they do.’

If it hadn’t been for the crowd opposite, she would
have liked to watch them leaving the house, Alexander dreadlocked and elegant
in his navy overcoat, the children in their red and grey uniforms.

Her mother had complained to her that the children’s
paintings and drawings were ‘taking over the bleddy house’. She had added, ‘I
wouldn’t mind, but they’re all rubbish.’

Eva could tell that her mother was baking today. The
room was full of the sickly sweet smell of the cakes that Ruby would sell later
to the crowd.

Eva had asked her not to do this. ‘You’re
encouraging them to hang about,
and
you’re exploiting them.’

But Ruby had bought herself a new living-room carpet
with the proceeds of her tea and cake sales. She had refused to stop, saying, ‘If
you don’t like it, get out of bed. They’ll soon go away when they see that you’re
just a very ordinary woman.’

Eva turned her head during her neck exercises and
saw a pair of magpies fly past with bits of straw clamped in their beaks. They
were nesting in a hollow in the sycamore trunk. She had been watching their
comings and goings with great interest for a week.

‘Two for joy,’ she thought.

She wondered if it were possible for a man and a
woman to be completely happy together.

When she and Brian had, at his insistence, thrown dinner
parties, the married couples had usually begun the evening with conventional
good manners. But, by the time Eva was serving her home-made profiteroles,
there was often one couple who were transformed into bickering pedants,
questioning the veracity of their partner’s anecdotes and contradicting them in
tedious detail. ‘No, it was Wednesday, not Thursday. And you were wearing your
blue suit, not the grey.’ They left early with faces as set as Easter Island
statues. Or stayed on and on, helping themselves to strong liquor, and falling
into a drunken morass of depression.

Eva smiled to herself, and thought, ‘I’ll never
again have to throw another dinner party, or attend one.’

She wondered if the magpies were happy — or was
happiness only a human perception?

Who had insisted on including ‘the pursuit of happiness’
in the American constitution?

She knew that Go ogle could supply the answer within
seconds of her asking, but she was in no hurry to find out. Perhaps it would
come back to her, if she waited.

Alexander knocked. ‘Are you ready for a
long-distance lorry driver with two families? One in Edinburgh, one in Bristol.’

Eva groaned.

Alexander said, ‘It gets worse. It’s his fiftieth
birthday next week. Both wives are throwing him a big party.’

They laughed, and Eva said, ‘It’s my party and I’ll
cry if I want to…’

Alexander said, ‘I haven’t seen you cry yet. Do you?’

‘No, I can’t cry.’ Then Eva asked, ‘What am I doing
here, Alexander?’

‘You’re giving yourself a second chance, aren’t you?
You’re a good woman, Eva.’

‘But I’m not!’ insisted Eva. ‘I resent them
disturbing my peace. I can feel their misery clogging up my system. I can
hardly breathe. How can I be a good woman? I don’t care any more. I’m bored by
the people I see. All I want to do is lie here without speaking, without
hearing. Without worrying about who’s next on your list.’

Alexander said, ‘You think my job is any easier? I
stand in a cold doorway freezing my balls off, talking to mentalists all day.’

‘They’re not mentalists,’ Eva protested. ‘They’re
just
humans
who’ve got themselves into a mess.’

‘Yeah? Well, you should see the ones I turn away. ‘Alexander
sat down on the bed. ‘I don’t want to be outside in the cold. I want to be
here, with you.’

Eva said, ‘I think about you at night. We share a
wall.’

‘I know I sleep a foot away from you.’

They both became transfixed by their own
fingernails.

Alexander said, ‘So, how long are you giving the
bigamist?’

‘The same as usual, ten minutes is all I can take,’
said Eva, irritably.

‘Look, if you don’t want to see him, don’t. I’ll get
rid of him.’

‘I’m a charlatan. They think I’m helping them, but I’m
not. Why do they believe everything they read in the newspapers?’

‘Forget newspapers. It’s the internet. You’ve no
idea, have you? No idea how crazy they are. You lie up here, we provide room
service, and you literally crawl under the duvet if you come across something
too unpleasant, something that might upset little Eva. Well, just remember
that downstairs is where the real work is done, dangerous work. I’m not a
trained bodyguard. I read your mail, Eva. I keep some of the letters back. Am I
doing any painting? No, I’m not. Because I’m protecting Eva from the maniacs
who want to cut her up. Eva the diva.’

Eva sat up straight.

She wanted to get out of bed and put an end to the
trouble she was causing. But when it came to swinging her legs round, the floor
did not look solid. She felt that if she stood, she would sink through the
floorboards as though they were made of jelly.

She was dizzy. ‘Give me a minute, please, then send
the bigamist up.’

‘OK. And start eating again. You’re like a bag of
bones.’ He went out and shut the door firmly behind him.

Eva felt as though she’d been punched in the chest.

She had sensed for some time that she had been behaving
badly. She was selfish and demanding and had almost begun to believe that she
was at the centre of her small universe. She would tell Alexander he should
vacate his room, take his children and go back to his own house.

She wondered if she could manage without Alexander’s
love and care. She had to protect herself from the awful pain of imagining her
life of self-imprisonment without him.

She resumed her exercises, with a series of leg
raises. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven …

58

Ho’s
parents, Mr and Mrs Lin, were walking along a dusty narrow pavement beside an
eight-lane highway.

They were not speaking. The noise of the traffic was
too loud.

Two years ago, there had been no highway. This had
been a neighbourhood of one-storey houses, shops and workshops, alleys and
mysterious pathways, where people made their living in full view of their
neighbours. There had been no privacy. If a neighbour coughed, it was heard by
many people, and festivals were celebrated communally.

They turned off and walked past a new tower block
and a car dealership where shiny new vehicles were for sale. They came to a
forecourt where electric scooters were arranged in lines according to colour.
Mr Lin had always wanted a scooter. He ran his hand over the handlebars and
seat of one in his favourite colour — aquamarine.

As they walked on, Mrs Lin said, ‘Look at the old
bicycles.’

Inside a mesh fence topped with security lights were
hundreds of them.

They laughed together, and Mrs Lin said, ‘Who would
even think about stealing old bicycles?’

They turned a corner and were on their old street.
The rubble had still not been cleared.

They passed the place where they had lived for nineteen
years, where Ho had played safely in the traffic-free alleys. Only five of the
original houses were still inhabited. One of them belonged to the moneylender,
Mr Qu. There were rumours that Mr Qu had contacts within the Beijing Tourist
Board, and that he had bribed the bulldozer driver to stop at his house. Mr Qu
was afraid of the professional moneylenders who were muscling in on his trade.

Mr Lin called softly at the open door. ‘Are you
there, Mr Qu? It is Mr Lin, your old neighbour.’

Mr Qu came to the door and greeted them. ‘Ha!’ he
said. ‘How do you like living in the sky, with the birds?’

The Lins were proud people.

‘It is good,’ said Mrs Lin, ‘better than living on
the ground, with the dogs.’

Mr Qu laughed politely.

Mr Lin had never liked the moneylender. He believed
that the interest Mr Qu extracted from his customers was outrageous. But he had
visited many banks and had been refused a loan at each of them. He had
protested that he would get a second job, and work through the night, helping
to build the new Beijing. But he was so frail, and the flesh around his head
was so shrunken that he looked as though, at any moment, he would be called to
join his ancestors. No bank employee expected him to live long enough to pay
off his debt.