by Sue Townsend
From the open window they could hear students calling to each other, enjoying the Indian summer. A group of them were sitting on the grass outside Sentinel Towers, laughing and drinking from cans of cider.
A girl’s fragile voice sang ‘Summer Is Icumen In’.
Brianne muttered, ‘Fucking Performing Arts, don’t they ever stop performing?’
The girl’s voice was joined by others until each voice was weaving an intricate vocal pattern.
From a room where politics students had gathered to drink Polish vodka and condemn every known political system came the sound of bombs falling and machine-gun fire. They were remarkably good impressions — evidence of long hours of practice and, conversely, of the few hours spent in lectures or writing essays.
Brianne said, looking at the screen, ‘How many years, Bri?’
It was their private joke, short for, ‘How many years in prison?’
Their hacking was motivated as much by curiosity as it was by the accumulation of money.
Before Brian Junior could reply, there was a shocking crash and the door to the room fell in on them, followed seconds later by the sound of Brian Junior’s door collapsing. He tried to reach the computer to wipe the hard drive, but his wrist was chopped by a black-gloved hand. There was roaring shouting confusion.
Brianne was handcuffed, then Brian Junior. They were told to step over the splintered door, sit on the bed and keep quiet. Brian Junior could not work out who the people in the black overalls and smoked-glass helmets were.
It pained them both to see their computer, laptops, smartphones, cameras, notebooks and MP3 players packed carefully into evidence bags and cardboard boxes.
Brianne said, ‘You must know that we’re only eighteen.’ A woman’s voice said, ‘Yes, and playtime’s over, children. You work for us now So, if you wouldn’t mind removing your underwear and spreading your legs.’
When the twins’ orifices had been thoroughly examined, and they had been put into white forensic suits, they were led away. The other students in the block had been told to stay in their rooms and keep the main entrance clear.
Two people carriers with blacked-out windows waited for them at the kerb, their engines running. They were not allowed to speak before they got into separate cars, but Brianne communicated to Brian Junior that all would be well, eventually. And as Brian Junior was turned away from her, she shouted, ‘I love you, bro!’
Ho was lying in his own bed, kissing Poppy’s pregnant belly. He spoke to the baby, asking if it was a boy or a girl.
He should have been dissecting the cadaver he had been allocated, a Mrs Iris Bristol. She had donated her body to medical science because she’d spent her funeral money on a 46-inch 3D television. Ho was thinking that he ought to go back to Mrs Bristol and replace her intestines, which were strewn across the dissecting table.
Poppy had sent him a text:
Come at once
He had removed his gown, mask and boots and hurried to Poppy’s side.
She needed money again. She explained why to him, but it was a complicated story and Ho’s English was not top notch. Sometimes he thought the English textbooks he had used in China were a little out of date.
Since he had been in England, he had not heard a single person say, ‘Top hole!’
Poppy smirked at the memory of Brianne and Brian Junior being led away, in silly white suits and handcuffs. She was glad she had made the phone call. The person on the other end had asked her to keep an eye on the rest of Professor Nikitanova’s students, and she’d said delightedly, ‘It would be a pleasure.’
65
Brian was watching the repeat of Loose Women in room twelve of a Travelodge in a suburb near Leeds. He didn’t know what the Loose Women were talking about. And he had never heard of the orange man with the grotesquely white teeth and sticky black hair. The man was being interviewed about the county where he lived, Essex, but all he could say about this location was, ‘It’s reem.’
Brian tried to apply formal logic to the problem.
Could he decode it given the paucity of the information?
Earlier, he had stopped off at a retail park and bought a blue paisley one hundred per cent acetate dressing gown. He had debated with himself whether or not to buy some matching slippers. He looked around for some assistance. He needed a woman’s point of view He had approached a young woman in Marks & Spencer’s uniform who was newly returned after five weeks of sick leave due to stress.
He said, ‘I’m a mere man …
What Kerry, in her nervous state, heard was, ‘I’m a merman.’ She tried to remember what a merman was, then it came to her — a merman was a mermaid’s partner.
Brian continued, ‘And as a hapless male, I’d like some advice. I have a lady friend who’s more or less your age. Can you tell me what’s cool on the street regarding dressing gowns and slippers?’
When Kerry didn’t answer, he prompted, ‘Would a dressing gown and slippers be considered sophisticated bedroom wear or, as the kids say, “a turn-off”?’
Kerry, who was only passing through men’s shoes on her way to her tea break, hesitated. Her inability to make a decision had been a large part of her problem. She stammered, ‘I don’t know I can’t help you.’ Then she fled, knocking into a male mannequin dressed in discounted Late Sun pastel beachwear.
Brian was disgusted. M&S were féted for the quality of their shop assistants.
He had taken his dressing gown and slippers to the Food Hall where he bought a large baguette, French butter, cheese and a bottle of cava. Champagne was wasted on a young girl, he thought. On an impulse, he had grabbed a bag of multi-coloured lollipops. As he stood in the queue he was in a state of mild sexual arousal. He was looking forward to his early evening assignation.
He had been careful over the summer — each time they had met in a different hotel. Brian hadn’t seen Poppy since their last meeting, at the Palace Hotel in Leeds.
She had said then, ‘My love for you is infinite, Brian.’ Brian had been tempted to correct her use of ‘infinite’, but instead had said, ‘I love you more than there are stars in the sky.’
They had been lying together, looking up at a Victorian brass light fitting which Poppy was afraid might fall from its mountings and kill them both. She wouldn’t want to be found all mashed up with an old fat bloke who was nearly a pensioner.
She had placed his free hand on her belly and said, ‘Bri, we’re going to have a baby.’
Brian was not keen on babies. After the twins were born, he had volunteered to work in Australia but had been turned down on the grounds that he was now ‘a family man’.
After a tiny pause, he had said, ‘How marvellous.’
She could tell he didn’t want the baby. She didn’t want Brian either. But whoever had said life was just a bowl of cherries had forgotten that inside each cherry was a hard stone, waiting to catch the unwary, resulting in a chipped tooth, a choking fit, slipping and falling.
All caused by those innocuous little cherry stones.
Now there was a gentle knock at the door. Brian leapt to his feet, pulled Eva’s comb through his beard and opened the door.
Poppy said, ‘What took you so long?’ She was wearing an orange poppy in her hair, and a flower-sprigged prom dress with Mary Jane shoes. She was not wearing her new piercings, and she had washed her face clean of make-up.
When Brian opened the door she was dismayed to see that he was in an old git’s dressing gown and the type of slippers that cartoonists draw He was also carrying a mug of Horlicks, the smell of which made Poppy heave. What Poppy saw when the door opened was the grandfather illustration in her Heidi book. Brian’s beard hadn’t turned white yet, but it would not be long. His ankles looked so frail and pasty in the big slippers that she was surprised they could hold him up without snapping. He pulled her inside as though he were taking delivery of Semtex.
Brian said, ‘Darling, you look so sweet, so charming, so young.’
Poppy sat on the end of the bed with her little finger crooked in the side of her mouth.
‘In other circumstances she would have looked gormless,’ thought Brian. But this was his Poppy, the mercurial child/woman whose presence he craved. He turned on the MP3 player that he had dug out of a drawer at home for the occasion. He searched the short playlist, found Songs for Swingin’ Lovers, selected ‘You Make Me Feel So Young’ and pressed play.
‘Ugh!’ thought Poppy. ‘More of that dead bloke, Frank Sinatra.’
When Poppy went into the bathroom, Brian lay on the bed and arranged the dressing gown so that his pale upper thighs were exposed. Because his feet had hard skin and corns, he kept his slippers on.
When she came out of the bathroom, she was naked apart from the flower in her hair. Before she turned the light off, her slightly swollen belly was in profile.
Brian thought, ‘I wonder if it has been scientifically proven that Homo sapiens can actually expire from a surfeit of love? If so, I’m a dying man.’
Poppy gritted her teeth, and thought, ‘C’mon, Poppy, come on, girl, it’ll all be over in five minutes. Close your eyes and think of Brian Junior.’
After the little struggle on the bed was over, and Brian lay on his back gasping for air, Poppy looked down at him and thought, ‘He looks like an overfed, dying goldfish.’ She said, Wow! That was awesome! Wow! Wow! Amazing!’
Brian thought, ‘Eva never once responded to my lovemaking like Poppy does.’
Poppy climbed off him and went back into the bathroom. He heard the shower over the bath running, and for a moment he thought about joining her. But his knees had been giving him gip lately and he wasn’t sure if he could lift his legs over the side of the bath. He suspected arthritis, it was in the Beaver family genes.
Poppy stayed in the shower for a long time. She spent most of it sitting in the bath and watching the hot water spiralling down the plughole.
When she got out, Brian was in a deep sleep. She found £250 in his wallet and, on the ‘personal details’ page of his Letts Diary, the code to his debit card. After checking his trouser and jacket pockets, she found £7.39 in small change and his phone. She scrolled through some of his photographs, they were mostly boring stars and planets. However, there was one of Brian with his wife and kids, taken in front of a gigantic rocket.
Brian and the twins looked like dorks, but Eva was beautiful. Poppy’s throat tightened. She knew she wasn’t beautiful or nice or famous like Eva, but she had something that Eva would never have again, her youth. Her own flesh was smooth and tight, and men like Brian would pay heavily to touch it.
As she dressed, she composed a plan. She grabbed the little pencil and pad that the hotel provided and sat down at the desk to write.
Start going to lectures.
Prostitute self with more old men.
Seduce married lecturer, tell him after one month I’m pregnant.
Accept payments towards cost of baby.
Go on holiday to Thailand when baby nearly due (disguise bump from airline).
Have baby.
Sell baby.
Return from holiday in mourning.
Show photo of pretty deceased baby to all three lovers.
When she was dressed, and the flower had been put back behind her ear, Poppy took Brian’s phone and texted:
dear Brian I taken ur £ to buy baby
clothes and equipment. got to rush.
essay to write on Leonard Cohen.
his part in America’s post Vietnam
melancholia, let’s meet again sooner
than soonest. as the yanks say, missing
you already! love, your little Poppy. p.s.
taken ur card for taxi.
66
Alexander heard a police siren, but he carried on painting. He had waited for the sun to rise over the far corner of the cornfield. He had almost given up before he had properly begun. The loveliness of the corn as it responded to the breeze was, given his limited skills, too fine to capture with a brush and watercolours.
Almost an hour passed before he stopped. He unwrapped the tinfoil from his cheese sandwiches, and unscrewed the lid of his Thermos flask. Why did coffee always smell better than it tasted?
As he ate and drank, he was conscious that he was happy. His children were well, he had no serious debts, his paintings were beginning to sell — slowly. And now that his locks were gone, he could go into a shop without the shopkeeper hovering over the panic button.
He forced himself not to think about Eva, who he had not seen for what seemed like an eternity.
He and Eva had never sat at a table together and shared a meal. They had not danced together. He didn’t know her favourite song, and now he never would.
Ruby was glad she had Stanley to talk to. She told him about Eva’s increasingly erratic recent behaviour, singing and reciting poems and making lists. She also confided that Eva wanted her door to be boarded up, apart from an aperture that would enable food and drink to be passed through.
Stanley said, ‘I don’t want to alarm you, Ruby, but that does sound fairly mad.’
Peter had boarded the door up, with Eva passing him the nails. By the time Ruby came back from tea at Stanley’s house, the job was done.
There is nothing Eva can do now but sort out her memories, and wait to see who will keep her alive.
There is a chink of light in Eva’s room. It comes from the badly boarded-up window It shines on to the wall opposite. Eva lies in bed and watches the intensity of the light. Just before the sun goes down, the light puts on a show of orange, pink and yellow The colours of confectionery. The chink of light is vital to her. She has put it there herself and now she is terrified that somebody will take it away.
She wants to be a baby and start again. From the stories Ruby tells about Eva’s infancy, she has concluded that it was grim: she was pushed to the bottom of the garden to scream. Ruby’s voice came to her when the twins were babies. ‘Don’t pick them up when they cry, you’ll mollycoddle them. They need to know who’s boss from the start.’
Whenever Eva tried to cuddle the twins, their little bodies would go rigid and two sets of eyes would stare into her own without even the ghost of a smile.
67
In the world outside, the Sun headline blared, ‘EVA STARVES!’ And there was a quote within the front-page story:
Mrs Julie Eppingham, 39, said, ‘The last time I saw her, I was horrified. She is obviously anorexic. But she won’t talk to me or look at my new baby. She obviously needs medical attention.’
Nurse Spears was walking through the surgery waiting room when she saw a copy of The Sun that had been discarded by a patient. She picked it up and read the front page. Her first thought was for her career. She should have visited Mrs Beaver more often to check for bedsores and muscle atrophy — and her mental health.
She drove round to Bowling Green Road and sat outside in her car, reading Eva’s full notes.
Sandy Lake knocked on the driver’s window with her good hand. The other was encased in plaster. As yet nobody had written on it. William didn’t do writing on plaster.
She asked, ‘Is Eva poorly?’
Nurse Spears wound the window down and said, ‘I can’t disclose information about my patients.’
She wound the window up, but Sandy Lake was beyond shame and continued to ask questions. Nurse Spears felt intimidated by the woman in a silly knitted hat. She was relieved when she saw a policeman. She parped the horn and PC Hawk walked towards the car.
He didn’t believe in hurrying, he was always solemn and purposeful. He bent down at the driver’s window, and Nurse Spears asked if he would escort her to number 15.
Sandy Lake demanded to accompany Nurse Spears.
PC Hawk said to her, ‘You’re supposed to be five hundred metres away.’
Sandy said, ‘I’m going further than that soon. William and I are going to live in a squat.’
Nurse Spears said, ‘That’s shocking.’
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Why? It’s my own house.’
PC Hawk looked at Nurse Spears, and waggled his forefinger at his temple.
Nurse Spears snapped, ‘I’d already worked that out.’
Upstairs, in the pitch dark of her bedroom, Eva was nearly through the gentle exercise regime she’d copied from PE lessons at school over thirty-five years ago. Eva hated any lesson that involved communal showers. She was amazed that some girls stood around naked, talking to the PE teacher, Miss Brawn. Eva was ashamed of her towel, which was not big enough to wrap around her body, and was grey and musty because she repeatedly forgot to take the thing home to wash.
Over breakfast in the 19705 it had been Ruby’s pleasure to teach her daughter good manners. On one such occasion Ruby had taught her that, should there be a conversational lull, it was Eva’s duty to fill it.
Eva was an earnest girl at twelve and anxious to do the right thing. Once, when walking back from the athletics track in the extensive school grounds, she had caught up with Miss Brawn as their steps became synchronised. Eva had not known whether it was right to stay synchronised, fall back or run ahead. She snatched a quick glance at Miss Brawn’s face. She looked unbearably sad.
Eva blurted out, ‘What are you cooking for Sunday dinner?’
Miss Brawn looked startled, but said, ‘I thought a leg of lamb—’
‘And will you make a mint sauce?’ asked Eva, politely.
‘Not make, buy!’ said Miss Brawn.
There was a long silence, which Eva filled with, ‘Do you have roast potatoes or mash?’