by Sue Townsend
Leather Trousers said, ‘I don’t care who you shag, Dr Beaver. The issue is that you chose to do it in the Clean Room. You could have polluted the atmosphere, corrupted the instrumentation and jeopardised the whole project. And ultimately defiled the surface of the moon.’
Brian asked defiantly, ‘Well, have we?’
Leather Trousers admitted, ‘No, the readings are clean. But it has taken thirty-six man and woman hours to verify — time we do not have. We are already behind schedule.’
Titania, who was hiding behind a long fringe of red hair, put her hand up and said, ‘Can I just say, in my own defence, that the sex was indeed “torrid”? But the danger was minimised — we were both wearing steriles, and it was all over in ninety seconds.’
Their colleagues laughed and looked at Brian.
Various veins throbbed in his head and neck.
He was quick to retaliate. ‘It was nothing but a quick leg-over.’ He looked around, hoping the company would find this amusing.
There was a sharp intake of breath, and one of the cleaners squeezed Titania’s hand.
Brian continued, not realising that he had volunteered to dig his own grave, “‘Turgid” would better describe our affair these days.’
One of the clerical staff rushed towards the door with a handkerchief pressed to her face.
Leather Trousers said, ‘C’mon, guys, let’s cool it, we’re all professionals, yeah? Even the cleaners, right?’ He smiled at the group of cleaners to show that he valued them and their work.
Titania sobbed. ‘Sex with the Gorilla went on a bit, but once he’d stumbled over my clitoris we both had good times.’
There was an appalled silence, and the cleaner withdrew her hand from Titania’s.
A technician whispered to his neighbour, ‘I like to experiment, but I draw the line at bestiality. That sounds bloody dangerous to me.’
Titania was surprised by Brian’s obvious and public contempt for her. She arranged her fringe so that it hid the lines on her forehead, and rummaged through her handbag for the lipstick she thought took ten years off her face.
She said, in a voice that threatened to crack, ‘Anyway, Brian, our lovemaking is quite often torrid.’ Turning to the assembled staff, she confessed, ‘Only last week he was tickling my nipples with his wife’s hairbrush, and shouting that I was a dirty whore, and he was going to punish me by tying me to the large telescope and have Professor Brady take me from the rear.’
Brian jumped up and shouted, ‘Not from the rear! I did not say the rear!’
Wayne Tonkin, the groundsman, laughed out loud.
Professor Brady said angrily, ‘Listen, Beaver, do not include me in your sicko fantasies!’
Titania looked around the meeting and said, ‘He’s used you all at some time.’
Some of Brian’s colleagues were repulsed by this revelation, but most were secretly pleased.
Professor Brady was in a dilemma. Could he suspend or otherwise discipline Dr Beaver for using his colleagues as sexual stimulants? Did sexual fantasies come under the heading of ‘sexual harassment in the workplace’? Was there anything in their contracts that implied they had been abused by Beaver’s thoughts?
Mrs Hordern straightened her overall and said, ‘It’s his poor wife I feel sorry for. I’ll bet she’s looking everywhere for that hairbrush.’
Titania said, ‘Don’t waste your time feeling sorry for Eva Beaver, Mrs Hordern, she’s a mere lump in the bed. She never gets up! Brian has to cook his own dinner every night.’
Leather Trousers intervened. ‘Look, guys, this is not helping us to move forward. Our minds should be focused on the upcoming launch of Walkers on the Moon.’
Wayne Tonkin said, ‘And ‘ow many billions of fuckin’ pounds are you spendin’ on another cack-’anded attempt to ‘it the fuckin’ moon, eh? Ain’t you ‘eard? The Yanks already done it in 1 969. And in the meantime I ‘ave to try and cut the bleedin’ grass with a lawnmower what don’t mow!’
Leather Trousers sometimes regretted his inclusive policy. This was one such time.
The flight operations engineers — a bolshie, troublesome group — took the opportunity to continue an earlier technical discussion about velocity. Phrases like ‘regressive elliptical orbit’ and ‘delta-v budget’ were hurled across the room.
Leather Trousers tried to shout over them, saying, ‘C’mon guys!’
But no voice was louder or more vociferous than that of Wayne Tonkin, who was a Barry White tribute singer in his local pub, the Dog and Compass. His voice rattled the artificial heavens above their heads.
“Ands up who wants a new, state-of-the-art, sit-on lawnmower?’
The resolution was carried almost unanimously.
Titania was the first to leave, together with an escort of sympathetic female staff. Brian was left on his own in the room.
He was afraid he would lose his job. It had been rumoured that there were to be involuntary redundancies, and he was fifty-five, a dangerous age in a young man’s game. Holes were beginning to show in Brian’s knowledge. He felt that the bandwagon was rolling away from him and that, however fast he ran now, he would never be able to catch up.
24
Eva was lying in bed watching the night sky, which was filled with small explosions of glorious colours and shapes. She could hear a fire engine in the distance and smell the smoke of countless bonfires. She pitied all the women out there who were, at this very moment, catering for their families and guests at their bonfire parties. She thought back to bonfire night 2010, otherwise known as The Great Disaster. Brian had put up a poster at work which said:
CALLING ALL BRIGHT SPARKS!
Join Brian and Eva and celebrate Guy Fawkes’ death!
Catholics Beware!
Eva had shopped on the morning of the fifth. Brian had told her to prepare enough food for thirty people, so she had driven to Morrisons and bought:
60 pork sausages
2 kilos of onions
60 torpedo rolls
35 baking potatoes
a huge lump of Cheddar cheese
a slab of Heinz baked beans
30 novelty Guy Fawkes biscuits
a large bottle of Heinz tomato sauce
3 packs of butter
toffee-apple ingredients for 30
1 Guy Fawkes mask and hat
10 livestock-friendly Chinese lanterns
6 bottles of rosé wine
6 bottles of white wine
6 bottles of red wine
1 barrel of Kronenbourg
2 crates of John Smith’s.
She had hurt her back hefting the Kronenbourg from the trolley into the boot of the car.
On the way home she had spent almost £200 on two boxes of assorted fireworks, and sparklers for the children.
The afternoon was taken up dragging a damp mattress from the garage down the garden and manoeuvring it on to the small bonfire, constructing an effigy of Guy Fawkes, making toffee apples (including chopping kindling for toffee-apple sticks), cleaning the downstairs lavatory, vacuuming the sitting room, deep-cleaning the kitchen, selecting listener-friendly CDs and jet-washing the patio.
Brian had asked his guests to turn up at six, so Eva filled the oven with a first sitting of potatoes at five thirty, set out the cold food and the drinks, rinsed and dried the glassware, placed candles into windproof lanterns, and waited.
At seven ten the doorbell finally rang and Eva heard Brian’s voice saying, ‘Mrs Hordern, lovely to see you. Is this Mr Hordern?’ As he was taking their coats, he asked, ‘Have you come in a crowd? Are the others parking?’
She said, ‘No, we’ve come on us own.’
When they’d finally gone, Eva declared, ‘That was the most excruciating night of my life — and I include in that giving birth to the twins. What happened, Brian? Do your colleagues hate you that much?’
‘I can’t understand it,’ he replied. ‘Perhaps my notice fell off the board. I only used one drawing pin.’
‘Yes,’ she said, ‘that’s what must have happened. It was the drawing pin.’
Later, as they were sharing a second bottle of burgundy, Brian asked, ‘Did you notice, when I let off my Beaver Special rockets? Neither of them gave so much as an “ohhh” or an “ahhh”. They just sat there, filling their stupid faces with carbohydrates and grease! I spent seven days building those. At great risk to myself. I mean, I was working with unstable materials. At any moment I could have blown myself and the sheds to smithereens.’
Eva said, ‘They were very beautiful rockets, Brian.’ She felt genuinely sorry for him.
She had watched his face each time he launched a rocket. He was as excited as a child, and had followed each projectile’s trajectory and height with the look of a proud father watching his baby walk for the first time.
Now, Eva looked around her white room and thought, ‘But that was then and this is now. I have absolutely nothing to do but to watch light move across the sky.’
25
Eva had been in bed for seven weeks and had lost a stone in weight. Her skin was flaky and it seemed to her that she was losing too much hair.
Sometimes Brian would bring her tea and toast. He would hand it to her with a self-pitying sigh. On many occasions the tea was cold and the toast was underdone, but she would always thank him effusively.
She needed him.
On the mornings he forgot about her, or was too rushed to think about breakfast, she went hungry. By now it was against Eva’s own rules to keep food in the room. And the only drink she allowed herself was water.
One day, Ruby made an attempt to persuade Eva to drink a glass of sparking Lucozade, saying, ‘This’ll get you up and about. When I had pneumonia and were hovering between life and death — I were just at the mouth of the tunnel, I could see the light at the end —your dad came to visit me with a bottle of Lucozade. I took a sip and, well, I were like Frankenstein’s monster after lightning struck him. I got up from my bed and walked!’
Eva said, ‘So, it was nothing to do with the antibiotics they were pumping into you?’
‘No!’ Ruby snorted. ‘My consultant, Mr Briars, admitted that he was at his wits’ end. He’d tried everything, even prayer, to keep me from going down that tunnel.’
Eva said, ‘So, Mr Briars — who had trained for ten years, and given lectures and written numerous papers on pneumonia — had failed you? Whereas a few sips of a sparkling glucose drink brought you back to life?’
Ruby’s eyes were shining. ‘Yes! It were the Lucozade what done it!’
In the early days of Eva’s self-incarceration her mother-in-law, Yvonne, had cooked every other day. She was a plain, good meat and two veg cook who believed that a liberal application of Oxo gravy made every meal a gourmet feast. She was never suspicious of Eva’s clean plates, believing that Eva had, at last, given up her taste for silly foreign food and had happily reverted to the traditional English cooking that Yvonne excelled at.
Yvonne must never know that her food (cooked with bad grace and many martyred sighs, crashes of pottery and slammed-down saucepans) was given to a family of foxes who had taken up residence behind an overgrown laurel in Eva’s front garden. These outrageously confident creatures, bored of feeding on leftover risotto, taramasalata and suchlike from the authentically middle-class residents who were the majority in Eva’s road, fought over Yvonne’s chops and mince. It seemed that they too preferred traditional English food.
At about 7 p.m. on every Yvonne evening, Eva would go to the end of the bed and scrape her plate out of the open window She loved to see the foxes eating and licking their muzzles clean. Sometimes she even imagined that the vixen looked up at the house and saluted her in a gesture of female solidarity. But this was only Eva’s imagination.
Once, Yvonne had been mystified when she found a piece of liver and bacon on the porch, and one of her home-made faggots on the pavement outside Eva’s house.
One day, in mid-November, Alexander called in to see Eva on his way to a job.
He said, ‘Do you know you’re on your way to looking like a skeleton?’
‘I’m not on a diet,’ Eva said.
‘You need some good food inside you, food that you like. Write a list and I’ll sort it out with your husband.’
Eva enjoyed thinking about the food she truly liked. She had endless time in which to think, but eventually she came up with a surprisingly small and modest selection.
‘She’d soon get out of that bed if her arse was on fire,’ said Ruby to Brian. ‘You’re too soft with her.’
‘She frightens me,’ admitted Brian. ‘I used to look up from a book or from cutting a chop and she’d be looking at me.
They were walking around Morrisons with a trolley, selecting the ingredients for Brian’s evening meals. Brian had Eva’s list in his pocket.
‘She’s always had that look,’ said Ruby, pausing at the stir-fry section. ‘I’ve often fancied doing a stir-fry, but I haven’t got a wonk.’
Brian couldn’t be bothered to correct his mother-in-law. He wanted to concentrate on Eva and the reason why she wouldn’t leave what used to be called ‘their’ bed.
He wasn’t a bad husband, he thought. He’d never hit her, not hard. There had been a bit of pushing and shoving, and once — after he’d found a Valentine’s Day card she’d received and hidden behind the boiler that said:
‘Eva, leave him, come to me’ — he had dangled her upside down from the landing. It had been a joke, of course. True, he’d had trouble pulling her back over the balustrade, and at one point it had looked like he might drop her on to the tiles below. But there had been absolutely no need for Eva to scream as loudly as she did. It was pure exhibitionism.
She had very little sense of humour, he thought —though he had often heard her laughing with other people in the next room.
He and Titania were always laughing. They shared a love of Benny Hill and The Goons. Titania could do a side-splitting impression of Benny singing ‘Ernie (The Fastest Milkman In The West)’. She hadn’t minded being thrown in the reservoir at Rutland Water either. She’d laughed it off.
Now Ruby was asking him how much wonks cost.
He guessed and told her, ‘About forty pounds.’
She shuddered and said, ‘No, I might not get the use out of it, I’m living on borrowed time as it is.’
Brian took out Eva’s shopping list. He showed it to Ruby and they both laughed. Eva had written:
2 croissants
basil plant
large bag mixed nuts
hand of bananas
box of grapes (seedless if poss)
6 eggs laid by free roamers
2 tubes of Smarties for Alex’s kids
Red Leicester cheese
1 bag mozzarella
2 firm beef tomatoes
small sea salt
1 black and red pepper pot
4 large bottles of San Pellegrino (H2O)
2 cartons grapefruit juice
serrated-edge knife
bottle extra virgin olive oil
bottle balsamic vinegar
1 large bottle vodka (not Smirnoff)
2 large bottles diet tonic (only Schweppes)
Vogue
Private Eye
The Spectator
Dunhill Menthol cigarettes.
After crying with laughter, Ruby needed to mop her tears. Neither of them had a handkerchief but, as they were walking down the toilet roll aisle, Ruby opened a packet of Andrex and took out a roll. She failed to find the end of the tissue, so Brian took it from her and located the end, which was infuriatingly stuck to the other sheets underneath. After a few moments’ struggle, he bellowed his frustration, then tore a wad of paper out of the roll and stuffed the rest back on to the shelf.
Ruby laughed for a long time when they found the San Pellegrino, and even longer when she saw the extra virgin olive oil. ‘I used to pour olive oil in Eva’s lugholes when she had the earache,’ she said
. ‘And now she’s pouring it on her salad.’ She was scandalised in the news and magazine section, when she saw the price of Vogue. ‘Four pounds ten? I can buy two bags of oven chips for that! She’s havin’ a laugh, Brian. If I were you, I’d starve her out of bed.’ The croissants provoked another outburst. ‘They’re nothing but a few flakes of pastry and air!’
‘She’s always been a snob about food,’ Brian said.
‘It’s since she went to Paris with the school,’ said Ruby. ‘She came back full of hers elf. It was all merci and bonjour and, “Oh the bread, Mum!” And she had that little woman with the voice that grates on you playing night and day.’
‘Edith Piaf,’ said Brian. ‘A frog I’m very familiar with indeed.’
‘She went back after she left school,’ said Ruby. ‘She worked in a chip shop doing double shifts for her ticket to Paris.’
Brian was amazed. ‘She didn’t tell me this. How long was she there?’
‘It were exactly a year. She came back with a Louis Vuitton case full of the most beautiful clothes and shoes.
Handmade! And the perfume! Big bottles. She’d never talk about it. I think some rich French ponce broke her heart.’
They were blocking the aisle. A young woman with a toddler sitting in the trolley crashed into them. The toddler shouted, ‘Again!’
What did she do in France?’ asked Brian. ‘And why didn’t she tell me about this Paris jaunt?’
Ruby said, ‘She was a secretive girl, and she’s turned into a secretive woman. Now, where’s this bleedin’ sea salt when it’s at home?’
Eva gave Brian instruction on how to assemble a tomato and mozzarella salad.
She said, ‘Please don’t add or subtract any of the ingredients, and I beg you to keep to the quantities.’
She told him which plate to use and which napkin. This precision made Brian even more cack-handed than usual.
Had he overdone the extra virgin oil? Did she say to tear the basil, or cut? Should he add lemon and ice to her vodka and tonic? She hadn’t said, so he left them out.