months. Part of her knew it was a contrivance, but she felt that if she fell off the pathway and on to the wooden floor, she would spiral out of control, spinning, following the earth as it journeyed around the sun.
Halfway up the stairs, Alexander stopped. He shouted, ‘Is it OK to come up?’
Eva shouted back, ‘Yes.’
When he walked up two more steps, he could see Eva sitting on her bed. She looked very beautiful. There was flesh on her bones and the deep hollows in her cheeks had been filled.
He stood at her bedroom door and said, ‘You look well.’
She said, ‘What’s that under your arm?’
‘It’s a painting, it’s for you. A present. For the bare wall facing you.’
She said, softly, ‘But I like the bare wall, I like to watch the light move across it.’
‘I froze my bloody arse off painting this.’
Eva said, ‘I don’t want anything in here that interferes with my thinking.’
The truth was, she was very frightened that she might not like his work. She wondered if it were possible to love a man whose artistry she did not admire? Instead, she said, ‘Did you know that we haven’t said hello to each other yet?’
‘I don’t need you to say hello to me, you’re always with me. You never leave.’
‘I don’t know you,’ Eva said, ‘but I think about you constantly. I can’t take the painting, but I’d love the bubble wrap.’
This wasn’t what Alexander had hoped for. He’d thought she would be wild about the painting, especially when he pointed to the tiny figure of Eva on the brow of a hill with her blob of yellow-blonde hair. He’d seen her flying into his arms. They would kiss, he would cup her breasts, she would gently stroke his belly. At some stage, they would climb under the duvet and explore each other’s bodies.
He didn’t expect to find himself sitting on the side of her bed, popping little transparent mounds in the bubble wrap. He said, between satisfying pops, ‘You need a gatekeeper. Somebody to decide who’s allowed in the house and who isn’t.’
‘Like Cerberus,’ she said, ‘the three-headed dog who guarded the entrance, to the cave where somebody – I can’t remember who – lived. There was something about a pomegranate and a seed, but no… I can’t remember.’
There was a timid ringing of the doorbell.
Eva froze.
Alexander said, ‘I’ll go.’
After he had left, Eva thought hard about the first time she had heard of the dog Cerberus.
She was in a classroom, rain was battering the long windows. She was worried because she had forgotten her fountain pen again, and at any moment the class would be asked to write something down. Mrs Holmes, her English teacher, was telling thirty-six twelve-year old girls a story.
Eva could smell the teacher’s scent – it was a mixture of Evening in Paris and Vicks vapour rub.
Alexander reappeared. ‘There’s a woman downstairs who read about you on the internet and is desperate to see you.
‘Well, I’m not desperate to see
‘Her daughter has been missing for three weeks.’
‘But why would she come to me? A woman who can’t get out of bed?’
‘She’s convinced you can help her,’ said Alexander. ‘She’s driven from Sheffield. The kid is called Amber, she’s thirteen years old -’
Eva cut in, ‘You shouldn’t have told me her name or her age, I’ve got the child inside my head now’ She picked up a pillow and screamed into it.
Alexander said, ‘So that’s a no, is it?’
49
Amber’s mother, Jade, had not allowed herself to bathe, shower or wash her hair, and she had not changed her clothes since her daughter’s disappearance. She was still wearing the baby-pink tracksuit, now grey with dirt, that she had been wearing on the day Amber went missing.
‘Amber was a happy, bubbly girl. I would normally have driven her to school but we got up late, I wasn’t dressed. We didn’t have time to make her a packed lunch. I was going to make it up and take it to her later. She wouldn’t have been abducted… she’s not pretty enough. She’s big-boned. She’s got awful hair. She’s got a brace on her top teeth. She wouldn’t have been abducted… these perverts go for prettier girls on the whole, don’t they?’
Eva nodded, then asked, ‘When was the last time you slept?’
‘Oh, I mustn’t sleep or have a shower, and I can’t wash my hair until Amber is back. I lie down on the settee at night with the Sky news on, in case there’s word about her. My mother blames me. My husband blames me. I blame me. Do you know where Amber is, Eva?’
‘No, I don’t,’ said Eva. ‘Lie down next to me.’
When Alexander brought tea up for Eva and Jade, he found them fast asleep, side by side. He felt a painful stab of jealousy, Jade was in
She smiled when she saw him, and carefully slid from under the duvet to the end of the bed, where she sat with her legs dangling.
Alexander noticed that her toenails needed cutting and that the pink varnish on them had almost vanished. Without speaking, he took out the Swiss Army knife his wife had given him. It had many tools within it, and was a bulky weight, but Alexander kept it close to him at all times. He took Eva’s right foot, put it on his lap, and whispered, ‘Pretty feet, but the toenails of a slut.’
Eva smiled.
Jade was still sleeping. Eva hoped that she was dreaming of Amber, that they were together, in a place where they had been happy.
When Alexander had carefully trimmed all of Eva’s toenails, he pressed the clippers back into the body of the knife and pulled out a small metal file.
Eva laughed quietly as he began to run it across her newly clipped toenails. ‘Do you think Jesus was the first chiropodist?’
‘The first famous one,’ said Alexander.
‘Is there a celebrity chiropodist today?’ asked Eva.
‘I dunno. I cut my toenails myself, over a page torn from the
They were talking at normal volume now, conscious that Jade was sleeping the deep sleep that follows misery and exhaustion.
Alexander went out to his van and came back with a bottle of white spirit and a white rag.
Eva said, ‘Are you going out to torch the neighbourhood?’
‘You may have been in bed for months, but there’s no excuse for letting yourself go.’ He dipped the rag into the spirit and wiped the old nail varnish from her fingers and toes. When he’d finished, he said, ‘And now I’m going to “jooge” your hair.’ He produced a tiny pair of scissors from the Swiss Army knife.
Eva laughed. ‘They’re from
‘Yeah,’ said Alexander, ‘for a wicked elf.’
‘And what would happen to you, if you failed your task?’
‘Seven swans would peck my big brown eyes out,’ he said, and then laughed too.
It took less than fifteen minutes to transform Eva’s hair from ‘Safe Eva’ to ‘Hey Eva!’
‘And finally,’ said Alexander, the magical helper, ‘eyebrows.’ He picked up his knife and, with great concentration, teased out a pair of tweezers so small that they were almost lost between his long fingers. We want
