The Woman who Went to Bed for a Year

was told that the registration was ‘in the post’.

He then moved to the crowd of what he thought of as ‘weirdos’, warning them that if they didn’t stop singing, ululating, tinkling bells and chanting ‘Eva! Eva! Eva!’ he would charge them all with a breach of the peace.

An anarchist in an army greatcoat, camouflage trousers and a black polo-neck sweater had spent an hour writing ‘HELP THE POLICE – BEAT YOURSELF Up’ on his forehead. He shouted feebly, ‘We’re living in a Police State.’

PC Hawk’s hand twitched towards his Taser, but he was reassured when a bulky woman in a Noddy hat said, ‘England is the best country in the world, and our police are absolutely terrific!’

The anarchist gave a harsh laugh.

PC Hawk said, ‘Thank you, madam, it’s nice to be appreciated.’

He thought the whole set-up was a disgrace. There were Asian people everywhere he looked, some on their knees praying, some sitting on a blanket having what looked like breakfast, and a large gang of elderly Muslim, Christian and Hindu women had gathered under Eva’s window, clapping and singing. There were no crowd barriers, no surveillance team, nobody directing the traffic. He rang for reinforcements, then walked over to the two old women standing in the doorway of number 15.

He demanded of Yvonne that he be taken to see the householder.

Yvonne said, ‘My son, Dr Brian Beaver, is at work, saving the world from attack by meteorites. You’d better talk to Eva herself. She’s upstairs, second on the left.’

PC Hawk could not help but be a little thrilled that he was about to meet the Eva woman who’d been on the front of the paper, and all over the internet, and who he’d seen on the television news refusing to talk to good old Derek Plimsoll. This proved to him that she had something to hide.

Who wouldn’t want to be on television?

It was his ambition to be the police spokesman for a murder enquiry. He knew all the phrases and sometimes practised them inside his head when he was driving around, bored, on his way to caution a youth for riding a moped without lights.

He saw Eva before she saw him. He was startled by her beauty – she was supposed to be an old woman of fifty, wasn’t she?

Eva was shocked to see a gangly baby-faced boy in a police uniform. She said, ‘Hello, have you come to arrest me?’

He took out his notebook and said, ‘Not at this stage, madam, but I’d like to ask you a few questions. For how long have you been in bed?

Eva tried to do the maths inside her head, then said, ‘Since the nineteenth of September.’

The constable blinked a few times and said, ‘Nearly five months?’

She shrugged her shoulders.

‘And are you separated from your husband?’

‘No.’

‘Are you planning to leave your husband in the near future?’ he asked, emboldened by her frank response.

Eva had watched her fair share of police dramas on television, and thought she knew about police procedures. But as the interview progressed, she began to realise that PC Hawk’s questions were entirely centred on herself- and her willingness to be courted by a young policeman.

Their final exchange was particularly ludicrous. ‘What is your attitude towards the police?’

‘I think they’re a necessary evil.’ Would you ever consider dating a police officer?’

‘No, I don’t get out of bed.’

She was relieved when the blushing boy finally said, ‘One last question. Why won’t you get out bed?’

Eva answered, honestly, ‘I don’t know.’

When PC Hawk returned to the station, he asked his superior officer if he could act as a family liaison officer for The Woman in Bed.

‘She’s causing a lot of trouble, the residents are posh and there’s talk of a petition. And one of ‘em’s a solicitor, sir.’

Sergeant Price was wary of the middle classes. He’d once been involved in a court case for slapping a youth about in the cells. How was he to know that the youth’s father was a solicitor’s clerk?

‘Yeah, why not?’ he said to PC Hawk. ‘The family liaison officers are both off on maternity leave. And you’re the nearest thing we’ve got to a woman.

As PC Hawk walked towards his car, his soft cheeks blazed. He thought, ‘Yeah, I’m definitely growing a moustache as soon as my beard comes through.’

It was an off-duty policeman called Dave Strong who found Amber. She was begging at the base of the Gherkin with a seventeen-year-old youth called Timmo, known to his parents as Timothy.

PC Strong had acted on his intuition – he had thought it odd to see a young girl in a soiled school uniform with her hand out, beseeching indifferent office workers to, ‘Spare some change!’ accompanied by Timmo singing his desultory version of Wonderwall’.

However, when interviewed by the press, Amber’s mother attributed her daughter’s rescue to Eva, rather than to the policeman. ‘She has special powers,’ Jade told a sceptical journalist from the Daily Telegraph. ‘She can see things that we can’t.’

As a news item, it had everything – young love and possible underage sex in The Sun and (because Timmo had run away from his A levels) an article in the Guardian: ‘Are we pushing our young too hard?’

The press eagerly pounced on this nugget of new Eva information. The Daily Mail, who were about to go with ‘Eva is ex-librarian’, scrapped their front page and replaced it with ‘ESP Eva finds runaway’.

52

At noon on Valentine’s Day, Brian and Titania came into Eva’s room.

She could tell that both of them had been crying. She was not too alarmed – it seemed to her that British people had long ago stopped puffing themselves together, they now cried habitually in public and were applauded for it. Those who didn’t cry easily were labelled ‘anal’.

Brian said, with a sob, ‘Mummy’s dead.’

Eva said, when she was able to breathe, ‘Your mum or mine?’

‘Mine,’ he wailed.

‘Thank God for that,’ she thought. She said to Brian, ‘Bri, I’m so sorry.’

‘She was a wonderful mother,’ Brian cried.

Titania attempted to take him in her arms, but he pushed her away and went to Eva, who felt obliged to pat his back. She thought, ‘This display from a man who “didn’t see the point” of buying his mother a birthday present, on the grounds that “she doesn’t need anything”.’

‘She fell off her stepladder trying to reach her emergency cigarettes,’ said Titania, her voice breaking and tears welling in her eyes.

Eva was not to know, but the real reason that Titania was crying was because Brian had not given her a Valentine’s Day card or a box of Turkish delight, as he had every year since their affair had begun.

Brian said, ‘Another casualty of smoking. She’s been dead for three days. What kind of society do we live in when an old lady can lie on her kitchen floor dead for three days before anybody notices?’

Who found her?’ asked Eva.

‘Peter, the window cleaner,’ said Brian.

‘Our Peter, the window cleaner?’ said Eva.

‘He rang the police and they broke the door down,’ explained Titania.

‘Yes, and Peter can bloody well pay for a replacement door. He knows very well we keep a spare key here,’ said