The Woman Who Went to Bed for a Year (44 page)

Eva finished her exercises and lay on the bed on top
of the duvet. She could not stop thinking about food. Her principal feeder,
Ruby, had a very lackadaisical attitude towards time, and the rota kept
getting messed up because Ruby was increasingly forgetful, and sometimes forgot
Eva’s name.

Stanley
opened the front door of Eva’s house, saying, ‘How do you do?’ to the nurse and
the constable. He shook their hands, led them into the kitchen, and said, ‘I
need to call on your expertise.’

As he wandered around the kitchen making tea, he
said, ‘I’m afraid Eva’s condition has deteriorated. She managed to use her
considerable charm on Peter, our mutual window cleaner, and subsequently she
has been barricaded into her bedroom, with only a slit in the door that we on
the other side can peer through and, in theory, pass her a plate of food.’

As soon as Stanley said the word ‘barricaded’, PC
Hawk saw the scene in his head. He would provide the intelligence, call for a
Special Support Unit, and would be present when Eva’s door was shattered with a
metal battering ram.

Nurse Spears saw herself at a medical tribunal,
trying to justify her neglect of a bedridden patient. She would plead overwork,
of course. And it was true — there were only so many diabetic foot ulcers,
injections and wound dressings she could fit into one day. She said, When I get
back to the surgery, I will inform her doctors. We may be talking a mental
health intervention and admission to a unit.’

Stanley lied, quickly, ‘No, she isn’t
insane.
She’s
entirely rational. I spoke to her this morning and made her a boiled egg with
white bread soldiers. She looked very happy, I thought.’

Nurse Spears and PC Hawk exchanged a look which
said, Who cares what civilians think? It’s we professionals who make the
decisions.’

Leaving their tea on the table, the three of them
went up to Eva’s barricaded room.

Stanley went up to the door and said, ‘You’ve got
visitors, Eva. Nurse Spears and Constable Hawk.’

There was no reply.

‘Perhaps she’s sleeping,’ he suggested.

‘Look here,’ asserted Nurse Spears, ‘my time is precious.’
She shouted, ‘Mrs Beaver, I want to talk to you!’

Eva was working through songs from the musicals in
her head. She sang ‘Being Alive’ from
Company
throughout Nurse Spears’
monologue about insane people she had cured.

Titania
put her lips to the slot in the barricaded door and said, ‘Eva, I need to talk
to you.’

Eva groaned, ‘Please, Titania, I’m not having an in-depth
conversation about your relationship with my ex-husband.’

‘It’s about Brian,’ said Titania.

‘It’s always about Brian.’

‘Look, can you come to the door?’

‘No. I can’t get out of bed.’

Titania pleaded, ‘Please, Eva, use the White
Pathway.’

‘I can only use it for one purpose.’

Eva had no strength left. She had felt it leaking
from her for some days. She could hardly lift her arms and legs, and when she
attempted to move her head off the pillows she could only manage a few seconds
before dropping it back with relief.

Titania said, ‘We could have been good friends.’

‘I’m not good at friendship.’

Titania peered through the slot and thought she
could see a small shining light and, below it, a prone white figure. She said,
‘I came to say how sorry I am for those eight years of lies. I’m here to ask
your forgiveness.’

Eva said, ‘Of course I forgive you. I forgive everybody
everything. I even forgive myself.’

Titania had been surprised at the awful state of the
house. It appeared that most of the machines had broken down. Ominous cracks
had appeared in the kitchen walls. The drains were stinking.

Titania said, ‘Look, let me take this door down,
Eva. I want to talk to you face to face.’

‘I’m sorry, Titania, but I’m going to sleep now’

Eva could tell from the lack of light on the wall
that it was dark outside. She was hungry, but it was her own rule now that she
would not ask for food. If people wanted to feed her, they would come.

When Titania went downstairs, she found Ruby making
a pile of sandwiches. Titania was shocked at how much Ruby had aged.

68

Ruby
apologised to the two doctors and the nurse for the unswept dead leaves in the
front porch. ‘As soon as I sweep ‘em up, others blow in.’

‘It is the nature of things,’ said Dr Lumbogo. When
they had congregated at the bottom of the stairs, Ruby said, ‘I can’t remember
the last time she ate anything hot. I chuck food in to her.’

Nurse Spears said, ‘You make it sound like the lion
house at the zoo.’

Ruby said, ‘My memory lets me down now and again.
And anyway, I can’t get up the stairs easy now I’m still waiting for that new
hip!’

She looked at Dr Lumbogo, who said, ‘You are on the
list, Mrs Brown-Bird.’

Dr Bridges asked, ‘Do we know if she’s likely to
harm herself or others?’

Ruby said, ‘I’ve only seen her violent once, and
that was at a woman dragging a kiddy along on its knees.’

Nurse Spears said, ‘There has been an aggressive
undercurrent in all my dealings with Mrs Beaver.’

‘But no overt aggression?’ queried Dr Bridges. Nurse
Spears said, ‘I wouldn’t turn my back if I was alone with her.’

They climbed the stairs and stood around outside.

Eva’s door. Eva was huddled in a corner of the room
against the bedhead and the outside wall. She hadn’t washed for days and she
could smell an earthy pungent odour that was not unpleasant to her.

She was so hungry that it felt as if her flesh were
melting away. She lifted her white nightgown and felt her ribs — she could
have played a melancholy tune on them. There was food next to the door. Local
people had posted sandwiches, fruit, biscuits and cakes, but she wouldn’t get
out of bed to pick them up. In desperation, Ruby had thrown apples, oranges,
plums and pears, hoping to hit the bed.

When Eva was asked who the Prime Minister was, she
replied, ‘Does it really matter?’

Dr Lumbogo laughed. ‘No, they are all blockheads.’

Dr Bridges asked, ‘Have you ever harmed yourself?’

Eva said, ‘Only when I have a bikini wax.’

When asked if she had thoughts about harming others,
she replied, ‘Nothing really matters, does it? Not compared to infinity. Look
at you, Dr Bridges, you’re composed of a mass of particles. You could be in
Leicester one second and an eighth of a second later be on the far side of the
universe.’

The two doctors exchanged a complicit glance.

Dr Lumbogo whispered to Dr Bridges, ‘Perhaps a rest
in the Brandon Unit?’

Nurse Spears said, ‘You’ll need an approved mental
health professional, and may I suggest a Section Four?’

Later,
when the doctors had gone, Ruby put her hat and coat on and went to Stanley
Crossley’s house.

When he opened the door, she said, ‘They’re taking
Eva away.’ She couldn’t bring herself to say Mental Health Unit. There was
something about the word ‘unit’ that chilled her.

He steered her through the books in the hallway and
sat her down in the neat sitting room, where the books were in stacks against
the walls.

Stanley said, ‘She isn’t mad, I’ve known mad people.
I’ve been mad myself.’ He laughed, quietly. Then he asked, ‘Does Alexander know
about this?’

Ruby said, ‘I’ve not seen hide nor hair of him.
Brian’s never in, now that Tit woman has gone. Yvonne’s in a better place, and
we haven’t heard from the twins in months. I feel as if I’m on my own.’

Stanley put his arms around Ruby and felt her yield
against him. She was gloriously soft and squashy, he thought.

He asked, ‘Doesn’t my face bother you, Ruby?’

Ruby said, ‘When I look at you, I can see the face
you used to have. And anyway, by the time you get to our age everybody’s face
is buggered up, i’n’t it?’

Now
that there was no chance of an audience with Eva, her acolytes drifted away
until only Sandy Lake and William Wainwright remained.

The two of them had many long conversations. They
kept their voices low out of consideration for the neighbours. They both
agreed that Prince Philip had murdered Princess Diana, that the first moon
landing had been filmed in a studio lot in Hollywood, and that George Bush had
ordered the Twin Towers to be destroyed.

Sandy had made cocoa for them on her Primus stove.
While they were sipping the hot liquid, William told Sandy about the slaves who
processed the cocoa beans.

Sandy said, ‘I can’t sleep without my cocoa!’

William said, ‘We’ll nick the next tin, right?’

He put his arm around her broad shoulders. She pressed
her cheek against his prickly five o’clock shadow. An owl screeched behind
them. Sandy jumped in alarm and William tightened his grip, pulling her towards
him.

He said, ‘It’s only a owl.’

‘An
owl,’ she
corrected him.

‘Yeah,’ he said, ‘a owl.’ They sat together and
talked until the moon bathed them in a milky warm light.

69

In
the early hours of the 19th of September, Eva woke to darkness. She immediately
broke into a cold sweat. She was afraid of the dark. The house was quiet, other
than the small noises that all houses make when their occupants are out.

She tried to control her rising panic by talking to
herself, asking why she feared the dark. She said aloud, ‘There was an army
greatcoat on a coat hanger on the back of my bedroom door. It looked like a
man. I lay awake all night, staring at the coat. I thought I’d seen it move —
imperceptibly, perhaps, but it definitely moved. I felt the same terror when I
walked by Leslie Wilkinson’s house. When he saw me coming, he would stand in
my path and demand money or sweets before he let me go. I would look towards
his house for help, and saw and heard Mrs Wilkinson singing as she washed up at
the sink. Sometimes she would look up and wave while I was being tormented.’

Eva told herself the story of how she had fallen
into a deep ditch lined with ice and snow and couldn’t escape. How her friend
had gone home and left her there most of the night, still trying to find a
foothold that would enable her to clamber out. It had taken three blankets and
two counterpanes before she stopped shivering.

The day a man, a stranger, had called her ‘a big ox’
when she trod on his toes in the scrum of Christmas shoppers outside
Woolworths. She had taken his voice with her into every changing room since.

Once, she had found a decomposing human hand in the
reeds of the canal bank. The school had not believed her and had punished her
for being late and, again, for lying about the hand.

She didn’t want to think about the baby she had miscarried
in Paris, to whom she had given the name Babette, and how she had returned from
the hospital to the spacious apartment to find him gone, taking his elegant
possessions and her young heart with him.

She wanted to cry, but the tears were stopped somewhere
in her throat. Her eyes were desert dry, and there was a ring of ice around her
heart, which she feared would never melt.

She spoke to herself again, harshly this time. ‘Eva!
Far worse things have happened to other people. You have been happy in your
life. Remember the snowdrops in the birch wood, drinking from the brook on your
way back from school, running downhill into sweet velvety grass with the edible
stalks. The smell of baking potatoes as they cooked in the embers of the
bonfire. Your earliest memory — opening a horse chestnut with help from Dad
and finding a shiny brown conker inside. A miraculous surprise. Defying the “No
Trespassing” signs and dancing in the ballroom of an abandoned mansion. And the
books! Laughing in the middle of the night reading P. G. Wodehouse. And in
summer, lying on a cool bedcover reading, with a bag of sherbet lemons by my
side. Yes, I have been happy. Listening to my first Elvis LP with my first
boyfriend, Gregory Davis — both equally beautiful.’

She remembered watching surreptitiously as Brian
tenderly fed the twins, in the middle of the night. It was a lovely sight.

When she was half asleep she surveyed her happy
memories and found that cruel reality kept crowding in on them. The birch wood
had been replaced by an estate of tiny houses, the brook was full of tipping
waste. The hill had been flattened, there was a One Stop Centre in its place,
and Brian had never again fed the twins in the middle of the night.

Alexander
was in a late-sown barley field with the permission of the farmer. They had
exchanged emails, and the farmer had waved from his tractor when they saw each
other in the middle distance.