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 3.1 5 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
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,
‘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
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.
4
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
