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Penguin Books is part of the Penguin Random House group of companies whose addresses can be found at global.penguinrandomhouse.com.
First published 2012
Copyright © Lily Broadway Productions Ltd 2012
The moral right of the author has been asserted
Illustration © Stephanie Von Reiswitz; Typography © Sarah Gardner.
All rights reserved
ISBN: 978-0-718-15753-1
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
Chapter 59
Chapter 60
Chapter 61
Chapter 62
Chapter 63
Chapter 64
Chapter 65
Chapter 66
Chapter 67
Chapter 68
Chapter 69
Acknowledgements
Follow Penguin
To my mother, Grace
‘Be kind, for everybody you meet is fighting a hard battle’
attributed to Plato, and many others
After they’d gone Eva slid the bolt across the door and disconnected the telephone. She liked having the house to herself. She went from room to room tidying, straightening and collecting the cups and plates that her husband and children had left on various surfaces. Somebody had left a soup spoon on the arm of her special chair – the one she had upholstered at night school. She immediately went to the kitchen and examined the contents of her Kleeneze cleaning products box.
‘What would remove a Heinz tomato soup stain from embroidered silk damask?’
As she searched, she remonstrated with herself. ‘It’s your own fault. You should have kept the chair in your bedroom. It was pure vanity on your part to have it on display in the sitting room. You wanted visitors to notice the chair and to tell you how beautiful it was, so that you could tell them that it had taken two years to complete the embroidery, and that you had been inspired by Claude Monet’s “Water-Lily Pond and Weeping Willow”.’
The trees alone had taken a year.
There was a small pool of tomato soup on the kitchen floor that she hadn’t noticed until she stepped in it and left orange footprints. The little non-stick saucepan containing half a can of tomato soup was still simmering on the hob. ‘Too lazy to take a pan off the stove,’ she thought. Then she remembered that the twins were Leeds University’s problem now.
She caught her reflection in the smoky glass of the wall-mounted oven. She looked away quickly. If she had taken a while to look she would have seen a woman of fifty with a lovely, fine-boned face, pale inquisitive eyes and a Clara Bow mouth that always looked as though she were about to speak. Nobody – not even Brian, her husband – had seen her without lipstick. Eva thought that red lips complemented the black clothes she habitually wore. Sometimes she allowed herself a little grey.
Once, Brian had come home from work to find Eva in the garden, in her black wellingtons, having just pulled up a bunch of turnips. He’d said to her, ‘For Christ’s sake, Eva! You look like post-war Poland.’
Her face was currently fashionable. ‘Vintage’ according to the girl on the Chanel counter where she bought her lipstick (always remembering to throw the receipt away – her husband would not understand the outrageous expense).
She picked up the saucepan, walked from the kitchen into the sitting room and threw the soup all over her precious chair. She then went upstairs, into her bedroom and, without removing her clothes or her shoes, got into bed and stayed there for a year.
She didn’t know it would be a year. She climbed into bed thinking she would leave it again after half an hour, but the comfort of the bed was exquisite, the white sheets were fresh and smelled of new snow. She turned on her side towards the open window and watched the sycamore in the garden shed its blazing leaves.
She had always loved September.
She woke when it was getting dark, and she heard her husband shouting outside. Her mobile rang. The display showed that it was her daughter, Brianne. She ignored it. She pulled the duvet over her head and sang the words of Johnny Cash’s ‘I Walk The Line’.
When she next poked her head out from under the duvet, she heard her next-door neighbour Julie’s excited voice saying, ‘It’s not right, Brian.’
They were in the front garden.
Her husband said, ‘I mean, I’ve been to Leeds and back, I need a shower.’
‘Of course you do.’
Eva thought about this exchange. Why would driving to Leeds and back necessitate having a shower? Was the northern air full of grit? Or had he been sweating on the M1? Cursing the lorries? Screaming at tailgaters? Angrily denouncing whatever the weather was doing?
She switched on the bedside lamp.
This provoked another episode of shouting outside, and demands that she, ‘Stop playing silly buggers and unbolt the door!’
She realised that, although she wanted to go downstairs and let him in, she couldn’t actually leave the bed. She felt as though she had fallen into a vat of warm quick-setting concrete, and that she was powerless to move. She felt an exquisite languor spread throughout her body, and thought, ‘I would have to be mad to leave this bed.’
There was the sound of breaking glass. Soon after, she heard Brian on the stairs.
He shouted her name.
She didn’t answer.
He opened the bedroom door. ‘There you are,’ he said.
‘Yes, here I am.’
‘Are you ill?’
‘No.’
‘Why are you in bed in your clothes and shoes? What are you playing at?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘It’s empty-nest syndrome. I heard it on Woman’s Hour.’ When she didn’t speak, he said, ‘Well, are you going to get up?’
‘No, I’m not.’
He asked, ‘What about dinner?’
‘No thanks, I’m not hungry.’
‘I meant what about my dinner? Is there anything?’
She said, ‘I don’t know, look in the fridge.’
He stomped downstairs. She heard his footsteps on the laminate floor he’d laid so ineptly the year before. She knew by the squeak of the floorboards that he’d gone into the sitting room. Soon he was stomping back up the stairs.
‘What the bloody hell has happened to your chair?’ he asked.
‘Somebody left a soup spoon on the arm.’
‘There’s soup all over the bloody thing.’
‘I know. I did it myself.’
‘What – threw the soup?’
Eva nodded.
‘You’re having a nervous breakdown, Eva. I’m ringing your mum.’
‘No!’
He flinched at the ferocity in her voice.
She saw from the stricken look in his eyes that after twenty-five years of marriage his familiar domestic world had come to an end. He went downstairs. She heard him cursing at the disconnected phone then, after a moment, stabbing at the keys. As she picked up the bedroom extension her mother was laboriously giving her phone number down the line, ‘0116 2 444 333, Mrs Ruby Brown-Bird speaking.’
Brian said, ‘Ruby, it’s Brian. I need you to come over straight away.’
‘No can do, Brian. I’m in the middle of having a perm. What’s up?’
‘It’s Eva –’ he lowered his voice ‘– I think she must be ill.’
‘Send for an ambulance then,’ said Ruby irritably.
‘There’s nothing wrong with her physically.’
‘Well, that’s all right then.’
‘I’ll come and pick you up and bring you back so you can see for yourself.’
‘Brian, I can’t. I’m hosting a perm party and I’ve got to have my own personal solution rinsed off in half an hour. If I don’t, I shall look like Harpo Marx. ’Ere, talk to Michelle.’
After a few muffled noises a young woman came on the line.
‘Hello … Brian, is it? I’m Michelle. Can I talk you through what would happen if Mrs Bird abandoned the perm at this stage? I am insured, but it would be extremely inconvenient for me if I had to appear in court. I’m booked up until New Year’s Eve.’
The phone was handed back to Ruby. ‘Brian, are you still there?’
‘Ruby, she’s in bed wearing her clothes and shoes.’
‘I did warn you, Brian. We were in the church porch about to go in, and I turned round and said to you, “Our Eva’s a dark horse. She doesn’t say much, and you’ll never know what she’s thinking …” ’ There was a long pause, then Ruby said, ‘Phone your own mam.’
The phone was disconnected.
Eva was astounded that her mother had made a last-minute attempt to sabotage her wedding. She picked up her handbag from the side of the bed and rooted through the contents, looking for something to eat. She always kept food in her bag. It was a habit from when the twins were young and hungry, and would open their mouths like the beaks of fledgling birds. Eva found a squashed packet of crisps, a flattened Bounty bar and half a packet of Polos.
She heard Brian stabbing at the keys again.
Brian was always slightly apprehensive when he called his mother. His tongue couldn’t form words properly. She had a way of making him feel guilty, whatever the subject of the conversation.
His mother answered promptly with a snappy, ‘Yes?’
Brian said, ‘Is that you, Mummy?’
Eva picked up the extension again, being careful to muffle the mouthpiece with her hand.
‘Who else would it be? Nobody else phones this house. I’m on my own seven days a week.’
Brian said, ‘But … er … you … er … don’t like visitors.’
‘No, I don’t like visitors but it would be nice to have to turn them away. Anyway, what is it? I’m halfway through Emmerdale.’
Brian said, ‘Sorry, Mummy. Do you want to ring me back when the adverts come on?’
‘No,’ she said. ‘Let’s get it over with, whatever it is.’
‘It’s Eva.’
‘Ha! Why am I not surprised? Has she left you? The first time I clapped eyes on that girl I knew she’d break your heart.’
Brian wondered if his heart had ever been broken. He had always had difficulty in recognising an emotion. When he had brought his First Class Bachelor of Science degree home to show his mother, her current boyfriend had said, ‘You must be very happy, Brian.’
Brian had nodded his head and forced a smile, but the truth was that he didn’t feel any happier than he had felt the day before, when nothing remarkable had happened.
His mother had taken the embossed certificate, examined it carefully and said, ‘You’ll struggle to find an astronomy job. There are men with more superior qualifications than you’ve got who can’t find work.’
Now Brian said, mournfully, ‘Eva’s gone to bed in her clothes and shoes.’
His mother said, ‘I can’t say I’m surprised, Brian. She’s always brought attention to herself. Do you remember when we all went to the caravan that Easter in 1986? She took a suitcase full of her ridiculous beatnik clothes. You don’t wear beatnik clothes at Wells-Next-The-Sea. Everybody was staring at her.’
Eva screamed from upstairs, ‘You shouldn’t have thrown my lovely black clothes into the sea!’
Brian hadn’t heard his wife scream before.
Yvonne Beaver asked, ‘What’s that screaming?’
Brian lied. ‘It’s the television. Somebody’s just won a lot of money on Eggheads.’
His mother said, ‘She looked very presentable in the holiday wear I bought her.’
As Eva listened, she remembered taking the hideous clothes out of the carrier bag. They had smelled as if they had been in a damp warehouse in the Far East for years, and the colours were lurid mauves, pinks and yellows. There had been a pair of what Eva thought looked like men’s sandals and a beige, pensioner-style anorak. When she tried them on, she looked twenty years older.
Brian said to his mother, ‘I don’t know what to do, Mummy.’
Yvonne said, ‘She’s probably drunk. Leave her to sleep it off.’
Eva threw the phone across the room and screamed, ‘They were men’s sandals she bought me in Wells-Next-The-Sea! I saw men wearing them with white socks! You should have protected me from her, Brian! You should have said, “My wife would not be seen dead in these hideous sandals!” ’
She had screamed so loudly that her throat hurt. She shouted downstairs and asked Brian to bring her a glass of water.
Brian said, ‘Hang on, Mummy. Eva wants a glass of water.’
His mother hissed down the phone, ‘Don’t you dare fetch her that water, Brian! You’ll be making a rod for your own back if you do. Tell her to get her own water!’
Brian didn’t know what to do. While he dithered in the hallway his mother said, ‘I could do without this trouble. My knee has been playing me up. I was on the verge of ringing my consultant and asking him to chop my leg off.’
He took the phone into the kitchen with him and ran the cold tap.
His mother asked, ‘Is that water I can hear running?’
Brian lied again. ‘Just topping up a vase of flowers.’
‘Flowers! You’re lucky you can afford flowers.’
‘They’re out of the garden, Mummy. Eva grew them from seed.’
‘You’re lucky to have the space for a garden.’
The phone went dead. His mother never said goodbye.
He went upstairs with the glass of cold water. When he handed it to Eva, she took a small sip, then put it on the crowded bedside table. Brian hovered at the end of the bed. There was nobody to tell him what to do.
She almost felt sorry for him, but not enough to get out of bed. Instead, she said, ‘Why don’t you go downstairs and watch your programmes?’
Brian was a devotee of property programmes. His heroes were Kirstie and Phil. Unbeknown to Eva he had written to Kirstie, saying that she always looked nice, and was she married to Phil or was their partnership purely a business arrangement? He had received a reply three months later, saying ‘Thank you for your interest’ and signed ‘Yours, Kirstie’. Enclosed was a photograph of Kirstie. She was wearing a red dress and showing an alarming amount of bosom. Brian kept the photograph inside an old Bible. He knew it would be safe there. Nobody ever opened it.
Later that night, a full bladder forced Eva out of bed. She changed from her day clothes into a pair of pyjamas that she had been keeping for emergency hospital admittance. This was on her mother’s advice. Her mother believed that if your dressing gown, pyjamas and sponge bag were good quality, the nurses and doctors treated you better than the scruffs who came into hospital with their shoddy things in a Tesco’s carrier bag.
Eva got back into bed and wondered what her children were doing on their first night at university. She imagined them sitting in a room together, weeping and homesick, as they had done when they first went to nursery school.
Brianne was in the communal kitchen and lounge of the accommodation block. So far she had met a boy dressed like a girl, and a woman dressed like a man. They were both talking about clubs and musicians she’d never heard of.
Brianne had a short attention span and soon stopped listening, but she nodded her head and said ‘Cool’ when it seemed appropriate. She was a tall girl with broad shoulders, long legs and big feet. Her face was mostly hidden behind a long straggly black fringe which she pushed out of her eyes only when she actually wanted to see something.
A waiflike girl in a leopard-print maxi dress and tan Ugg boots came in with a bulging bag from Holland & Barrett which she stuffed into the fridge. Half her head had been shaved and a broken heart tattooed on to her scalp. The other half was a badly dyed lopsided green curtain.
Brianne said, ‘Amazing hair. Did you do it yourself?’
‘I got my brother to help me,’ the girl said. ‘He’s a poofter.’
The girl’s sentences had a rising inflection as though she were permanently questioning the validity of her own statements.
Brianne asked, ‘Are you Australian?’
The girl shouted, ‘God! No!’
Brianne said, ‘I’m Brianne.’
The girl said, ‘I’m Poppy. Brianne? I haven’t heard that before.’
‘My dad’s called Brian,’ said Brianne tonelessly. ‘Is it hard to walk in a maxi?’
‘No’, said Poppy. ‘Try it on if you like. It might stretch to fit you.’
She pulled the maxi dress over her head and stood revealed in a wispy bra and knickers. They both looked as though they had been made from scarlet cobwebs. She seemed to have no inhibitions whatsoever. Brianne had many inhibitions. She hated everything about herself: face, neck, hair, shoulders, arms, hands, fingernails, belly, breasts, nipples, waist, hips, thighs, knees, calves, ankles, feet, toenails and voice.
She said, ‘I’ll try it on in my room.’
‘Your eyes are amazing,’ said Poppy.
‘Are they?’
‘Are you wearing green contacts?’ asked Poppy. She stared into Brianne’s face and pushed the fringe away.
‘No.’
‘They’re an amazing green.’
‘Are they?’
‘Awesome.’
‘I need to lose some weight.’
‘Yeah, you do. I’m a weight loss expert. I’ll teach you how to be sick after every meal.’
‘I don’t want to be bulimic.’
‘It was good enough for Lily Allen.’
‘I hate being sick.’
‘Isn’t it worth it to be thin? Remember the saying: “You can’t be too rich or too thin.” ’
‘Who said that?’
‘I think it was Winnie Mandela.’
Poppy followed Brianne to her room, still in her underwear. They met Brian Junior in the corridor as he was locking the door to his room. He stared at Poppy and she stared back. He was the most beautiful man she had ever seen. She threw her arms above her head and affected a glamour girl pose, hoping that Brian Junior would admire her C cup breasts.
He said under his breath, but loud enough to be heard, ‘Gross.’
Poppy said, ‘Gross? It would be really useful to me if you would elaborate. I need to know which bits of me are particularly repellent.’
Brian Junior shifted uncomfortably.
Poppy walked up and down past him, did a twirl and rested one hand on a bony hip. She then looked at him expectantly but he did not speak. Instead, he unlocked the door to his room and went back inside.
Poppy said, ‘He’s a baby. A rude, mindblowingly awesome-looking baby.’
Brianne said, ‘We’re both seventeen. We took our A levels early.’
‘I would have taken mine early but I had a personal tragedy …’ Poppy paused, waiting for Brianne to ask about the nature of the tragedy. When Brianne remained silent, she said, ‘I can’t talk about it. I still managed to get four A*s. Oxbridge wanted me. I went for an interview, but quite honestly I couldn’t live and study somewhere so old-fashioned.’
Brianne asked, ‘Where was your interview – Oxford or Cambridge?’
Poppy said, ‘Do you have auditory defects? I told you, I was interviewed in Oxbridge.’
‘And you were offered a place to study at Oxbridge University?’ Brianne checked, ‘Remind me, where is Oxbridge?’
Poppy mumbled, ‘It’s in the middle of the country,’ and went out.
Brianne and Brian Junior had been interviewed at Cambridge University, and both of them had been offered a place. The Beaver twins’ small fame had gone before them. At Trinity College they were given what looked like an impossibly difficult maths problem to solve. Brian Junior went to a separate room with an invigilator. When they each put down their pencil after fifty-five minutes of frenzied workings-out on the A4 paper supplied, the chair of the interviewing panel read their workings as if they were a chapter of a racy novel. Brianne had meticulously, if unimaginatively, worked her way straight to the solution. Brian Junior had reached it by a more mysterious path. The panel declined to ask the twins about hobbies or pastimes. It was easy to tell that they did nothing outside of their chosen field.
After the twins had turned the offer down, Brianne explained that she and her brother would follow the famous professor of mathematics Lenya Nikitanova to Leeds.
‘Ah, Leeds,’ said the chairperson. ‘It has a remarkable mathematical faculty, world class. We tried to tempt the lovely Nikitanova here by offering her disgracefully extravagant inducements, but she emailed that she preferred to teach the children of the workers – an expression I have not heard since Brezhnev was in office – and was taking up the post of lecturer at Leeds University! Typically quixotic of her!’
Now, in Sentinel Towers student residence, Brianne said, ‘I’d sooner try the dress on in private. I’m shy about my body.’
Poppy said, ‘No, I’m coming in with you. I can help you.’
Brianne felt suffocated by Poppy. She did not want to let her inside her room. She did not want her as a friend but, despite her feelings, she unlocked the door and let Poppy inside.
Brianne’s suitcase was open on the narrow bed. Poppy immediately began to unpack and put Brianne’s clothes and shoes away in the wardrobe. Brianne sat helplessly on the end of the bed, saying, ‘No, Poppy. I can do it.’ She thought that when Poppy had gone, she would arrange her clothes to her own satisfaction.
Poppy opened a jewellery box decorated in tiny pearlised shells and began to try on various pieces. She pulled out the silver bracelet with the three charms: a moon, a sun and a star.
The bracelet had been bought by Eva in late August to celebrate Brianne’s five A*s at A level. Brian Junior had already lost the cufflinks his mother had given him to commemorate his six A*s.
‘I’ll borrow this,’ Poppy said.
‘No!’ Brianne shouted. ‘Not that! It’s precious to me.’ She took it from Poppy and slipped it on to her own wrist.
Poppy said, ‘Omigod, you’re such a materialist. Chill out.’
Meanwhile, Brian Junior paced up and down in his shockingly tiny room. It took only three steps to move from the door to the window. He wondered why his mother had not rung as she had promised.
He had unpacked earlier and everything had been neatly put away. His pens and pencils were lined up in colour order, starting with yellow and finishing with black. It was important to Brian Junior that a red pen came exactly at the centre of the line.
Earlier that day, once the twins’ belongings had been brought up from the car, their laptops were being charged, and the new Ikea kettles, toasters and lamps had been plugged in, Brian, Brianne and Brian Junior had sat in a line on Brianne’s bed with nothing to say to each other.
Brian had said, ‘So,’ several times.
The twins were expecting him to go on to speak, but he had relapsed into silence.
Eventually, he cleared his throat and said, ‘So, the day has come, eh? Daunting for me and Mum, and even more so for you two – standing on your own two feet, meeting new people.’
He stood up and faced them. ‘Kids, make a bit of an effort to be friendly to the other students. Brianne, introduce yourself, try to smile. They won’t be as clever as you and Brian Junior, but being clever isn’t everything.’
Brian Junior said, in a flat tone, ‘We’re here to work, Dad. If we needed “friends” we’d be on Facebook.’
Brianne took her brother’s hand and said, ‘It might be good to have a friend, Bri. Y’know, like, somebody I could talk to about …’ She hesitated.
Brian supplied, ‘Clothes and boys and hairdos.’
Brianne thought, ‘Ugh! Hairdos? No, I’d want to talk about the wonders of the world, the mysteries of the universe.’
Brian Junior said, ‘We can make friends once we’ve obtained our doctorates.’
Brian laughed, ‘Loosen up, BJ. Get drunk, get laid, hand an essay in late, for once. You’re a student, steal a traffic cone!’
Brianne looked at her brother. She could no more imagine him roaring drunk with a traffic cone on his head than she could see him on that stupid programme Strictly Come Dancing, clad in lime-green Lycra, dancing the rumba.
Before Brian left, there were some badly executed hugs and backslaps. Noses were kissed instead of lips and cheeks. They trod on each other’s toes in their haste to leave the cramped room and get to the lift. Once there, they waited an interminable time for the lift to travel up six floors. They could hear it wheezing and grinding its way towards them.
When the doors opened, Brian almost ran inside. He waved goodbye to the twins and they waved back. After a few seconds, Brian stabbed at the Ground Floor button, the doors closed and the twins did a high five.
Then the lift returned with Brian its captive.
The twins were horrified to see that their father was crying. They were about to step in when the doors crushed shut, and the lift jerked and groaned itself downstairs.
‘Why is Dad crying?’ asked Brian Junior.
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.
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 3.15 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.
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.
She would not be chopping vegetables and browning meat for a casserole. She would not be baking bread and cakes because Brian preferred the home-made to the shop bought. She would not be cutting grass, weeding, planting and sweeping paths or collecting leaves in the garden. She would not be painting the new fence with creosote. She would not be chopping wood to light the real log fire that Brian sat next to after he came home from work in the winter months. She would not be brushing her hair, showering or hurriedly applying make-up.
Today she would not be doing any of those things.
She would not be worrying that her clothes were uncoordinated, because she could not see the time when she would be wearing clothes again. She would only be wearing pyjamas and a dressing gown for the foreseeable future.
She would rely on other people to feed her, wash her and buy her food. She didn’t know who these people were but she believed that most people were longing to demonstrate their innate goodness.
She knew she wouldn’t be bored – she had a great deal to think about.
She hurried to the lavatory, washed her face and under her arms, but it felt wrong to be out of bed. She thought that with her feet on the floor she would easily be lured downstairs by her own sense of duty. Perhaps in future she would ask her mother for a bucket. She remembered the porcelain potty under her grandmother’s sagging bed – as a child, it had been Ruby’s job to empty the contents early every morning.
Eva lay back on the pillows and quickly fell asleep, only to be woken by Brian asking, ‘What have you done with my clean shirts?’
Eva said, ‘I gave them to a passing washerwoman. She’s going to take them to a babbling brook she knows and pummel them on the stones. She’ll have them back by Friday.’
Brian, who had not been listening, shouted, ‘Friday! That’s no good to me! I need one now!’
Eva turned over to face the window. A few golden leaves were spiralling down from the sycamore outside. She said, ‘You don’t have to wear a shirt. It’s not a condition of your employment. Professor Brady dresses as if he was in The Rolling Stones.’
‘It’s bloody embarrassing,’ said Brian. ‘We had a delegation from NASA last week. Every last one of them was in a blazer, collar and tie, and they were shown round by Brady in his creaking leather trousers, Yoda T-shirt and down-at-heel cowboy boots! On his salary! All the bloody cosmologists are the same. And when they’re together in the one room, it looks like a meeting in a drug rehabilitation unit! I’m telling you, Eva, if it wasn’t for we astronomers they’d be dead in the water!’
Eva turned back to him and said, ‘Wear your navy polo shirt, your chinos and your brown brogues.’ She wanted him out of her room. She would ask her uneducated mother to show Dr Brian Beaver BSc, MSc, D Phil (Oxon) how to manipulate the simple dials on the washing machine.
Before Brian left the room she asked him, ‘Do you think there is a God, Brian?’
He was sitting on the bed, tying his shoelaces. ‘Don’t tell me you’ve got religion, Eva. It always ends in tears. According to Steve Hawking’s latest book, God’s not fit for purpose. He’s a character in a fairy tale.’
‘Then why do so many millions of people believe in him?’
‘Look, Eva, the stats are against it. Something can actually come from nothing. Heisenbergian uncertainty allows a bubble of space–time to inflate out of nowhere …’ He paused. ‘But I admit the particle side is … difficult. The string theory supersymmetry boys really need to find the Higgs boson. And the wave function collapse is always a problem.’
Eva nodded, and said, ‘I see. Thank you.’
He groomed his beard with Eva’s comb and said, ‘So, how long do you intend to stay in bed?’
‘Where does the universe end?’ asked Eva.
Brian fiddled with his beard, twirling the scraggy end between his fingers. ‘Can you tell me why you want to retreat from the world, Eva?’
‘I don’t know how to live in it,’ she said. ‘I can’t even work the remote. I preferred it when there were three channels and all you had to do was go duh, duh, duh.’ She stabbed at the imaginary knobs on the imaginary television.
‘So, you’re going to loll about in bed because you can’t work the remote?’
Eva muttered, ‘I can’t work the new oven stroke grill stroke microwave either. And I can’t work out how much we’re paying E.ON per quarter on our electricity bill. Do we owe them money, Brian, or do they owe us?’
‘I don’t know,’ he admitted. He took her hand and said, ‘I’ll see you tonight. By the way, is sex off the menu?’
‘I don’t sleep with Steve no more,’ said Julie. ‘He’s in the box room with his PlayStation and The Best of Guns and Roses.’
‘Don’t you miss him? Physically?’ asked Eva.
‘No, we still have sex! Downstairs, after the kids have gone to bed. We used to have to fit it in during the adverts – you know how much I love my soaps – but now we can just Sky Plus. Something had to be done, after I missed the bit where Phil Mitchell took heroin for the first time. So, why are you still in bed?’
‘I like it here,’ said Eva. She liked Julie but she already wanted her to go.
Julie said, ‘My hair’s falling out.’
‘It’s not cancer?’
Julie laughed. ‘It’s the stress of work. There’s a new manager, a woman called Mrs Damson. God knows where she’s from. She’s one of them managers what expect you to work the full eight hours. When Bernard was the manager, we hardly did no work. We’d go in at eight o’clock, I’d put the kettle on, then me and the other girls would sit around in the staffroom having a laugh until the customers started banging on the door to be let in. Sometimes, for a laugh, we’d pretend not to hear them and we wouldn’t open the door until half past nine. Yeah, Bernard were lovely to work for. Shame he’s gone. It weren’t his fault our branch never made a profit. The customers just stopped coming.’
Eva closed her eyes, feigning sleep, but Julie continued.
‘Mrs Damson had only been there three days when I broke out in one of my rashes.’ She pushed the sleeve of her jumper up past her elbow and shoved her bare arm in front of Eva. ‘Look, I’m covered in it.’
Eva said, ‘I can’t see anything.’
Julie pushed her sleeve down. ‘It’s fading now.’ She got up and walked about the bedroom. She picked up the bottle of Olay Regenerist, which promised to rejuvenate the skin, gave a little laugh and replaced it on the dressing table.
‘You’re having a breakdown,’ she said.
‘Am I?’
‘It’s the first symptom – when I went doolally after Scott was born, I stayed in bed for five days. Steve had to fly back to his rig. I was worried about him in the helicopter, they’re always crashing, Eva. I wouldn’t eat, wouldn’t drink, didn’t wash my face. I just cried and cried. I wanted a girl so bad. I’d already got four boys.’
‘So, you’d got a reason for feeling depressed.’
Julie continued, ignoring Eva, ‘I was so sure. I’d only got pink clothes. When I took him out in his pram, people would look in and say, “She’s gorgeous, what’s her name?” I’d say Amelia because that’s the name I would have given my little girl. Do you think that’s why our Scott is gay?’
‘He’s only five,’ said Eva. ‘He’s far too young to be anything.’
‘I bought him a little china tea service the other week. Teapot, milk jug, sugar bowl, two cups and saucers, little miniature spoons, very pretty, everything covered in pink roses. He played all day with it, as well – until Steve came home and kicked it over.’ She gave a little laugh. ‘Then he cried and cried.’
‘Scott?’ asked Eva.
‘No, Steve! Keep up.’
‘What did Scott do?’ said Eva.
‘Same as he always does when there’s trouble in the house. He goes to my wardrobe and strokes my clothes.’
‘Isn’t that a bit –’
‘A bit what?’ said Julie.
‘A bit weird?’
‘Is it?’
Eva nodded.
Julie sat her large bulk on Eva’s bed. ‘To be honest, Eva, I’ve somehow lost my way with my boys. They’re not bad lads but I don’t know what to do with ’em all. They’re so noisy and rough with each other. The noise they make when they’re running up the stairs, the way they eat and argue over the remote, their horrible boys’ clothes, the state of their fingernails. Me and Steve are thinking about trying for a girl again, next time he’s got shore leave. What do you think?’
Eva said, ‘No, I forbid it!’
Both women were surprised at Eva’s vehement tone.
Eva looked out of the window and saw a boy climbing the sycamore in her front garden. Nodding towards the window, she said casually, ‘Isn’t that one of your boys trying to climb our tree?’
Julie looked out of the window, then ran to open it. She yelled, ‘Scott! Get down, you’ll break your bleddy neck!’
Eva said, ‘He’s a boy, Julie. Put his tea set away.’
‘Yeah, I am going to try for a girl.’
As she was walking down the stairs, Julie thought, ‘Wish it was me in that bed.’