She said, ‘Goodnight, Brian,’ in her normal voice.
He said, out of the darkness, ‘I don’t know what to say when people ask me why you’ve taken to your bed. It’s embarrassing for me. I can’t concentrate at work. And I’ve got my mother and your mother asking questions I can’t answer. And I’m used to knowing the answers – I’m a Doctor of Astronomy, for fuck’s sake. And Planetary Science.’
Eva said, ‘You’ve never once answered me properly when I ask you if God exists.’
Brian threw his head back and shouted, ‘For God’s sake! Use your own bloody brain!’
Eva said, ‘I haven’t used my brain for so long, the poor thing is huddled in a corner, waiting to be fed.’
‘You’re constantly mixing up the concept of heaven with the bloody cosmos! And if your mother asks me one more time to read her stars… I have explained the difference between an astronomer and an astrologer a million fucking times!’ He jumped out of bed, stubbed his toe on the bedside cabinet, screamed and limped out of the room. She heard the door to Brian Junior’s room slam.
Eva fumbled in the cupboard of her bedside table, where she kept her most precious things, and pulled out her school exercise books. She had kept them clean and safe for over thirty years. As she leafed through them the moonlight shone on the golden stars she had won for her excellent work.
She had been a very clever girl whose essays were always read aloud in class, and she was told by her teachers that with hard study and a grant she might even get to university. But she had been needed to go to work and bring in a wage. And how could Ruby afford to buy a grammar school uniform from a specialist shop on a widow’s pension?
In 1977 Eva left the Leicester High School for Girls and trained as a telephonist at the GPO. Ruby took two- thirds of her wages for bed and board.
When Eva was sacked for constantly connecting the wrong line to the wrong customer, she was too afraid to tell her mother, so she went and sat in the little Arts and Crafts-designed library and read her way through a selection of the English classics. Then, a fortnight after her sacking, the Head Librarian – a cerebral man who had no managerial skills – put up a notice advertising a vacancy for a library assistant: ‘Qualifications Essential.’
She had no suitable qualifications. But at the informal interview the Head Librarian told Eva that in his opinion she was supremely qualified since he had seen her reading
Eva told her mother that she had changed her job and would in future be earning less, at the library.
Ruby said she was a fool and that books were overrated and very unhygienic. ‘You never know who’s been messing about with the pages.’
But Eva loved her job.
To unlock the heavy outer door and to walk into the hushed interior, with the morning light spilling from the high windows on to the waiting books, gave her such pleasure that she would have worked for nothing.
8
It was in the afternoon of the fifth day that Peter, the window cleaner, called. Eva had slept on and off for twelve hours. She had promised herself this indulgence ever since the twins had been lifted out of her womb, and placed into her arms over seventeen years ago.
Brianne had been a sickly child, pasty and irritable with a scribble of black hair and a permanent scowl. She slept fitfully and woke at the slightest noise. Eva would hear her baby daughter’s thin wail and dash to pick her up before it turned into relentless screaming. Brian Junior slept through the night, and when he woke in the morning he played with his toes and smiled at the Scooby-Doo mobile above his head. Ruby would say, ‘This child has come straight from heaven.’
When Brianne was screaming in Eva’s arms, Ruby’s advice was, ‘Put an inch or two of brandy in her bottle. My main used to. It didn’t do me any harm.’
Eva would look at Ruby’s raddled face and shudder.
She had spoken to her window cleaner once a month for the past ten years, yet she knew nothing about him - apart from the fact that his name was Peter Rose and he was married, with a disabled daughter called Abigail. She heard his ladder scraping up the side of the house before coming to a rest on the window sill. Had she wanted to hide, she could have run into the bathroom but she decided to ‘style it out’ – an expression which Brianne frequently used and which Eva interpreted as smiling in the face of awkward social situations.
So, Eva smiled and waved awkwardly when she saw Peter’s head appear above the sill. His cheeks reddened with embarrassment. He poked his head round the open window and said, ‘Do you want me to come back later?’
‘No,’ she said. ‘You can do them now’
He smeared soapy water all over the window and asked, Are you poorly?’
‘I just wanted to stay in bed,’ she said.
‘That’s what I wanna do on my day off,’ he agreed. ‘Curl up and ‘ibernate. But I can’t. Not with Abigail…’
‘How is she?’ asked Eva.
‘Same as always,’ said Peter, ‘but heavier. She don’t talk, she can’t walk, she don’t do nothing for herself…’ He paused while he rubbed furiously at the window ‘She’s in nappies and she’s fourteen. She ain’t even pretty. Her mum dresses her beautiful. She’s always colour coordinated and her hair is always done immaculate. Abigail is lucky, I reckon. She’s got the finest mum in the world.’
Eva said, ‘I couldn’t do it.’
Peter was using a hand-held device that looked like a truncated windscreen wiper to clear the window of excess water.
Why couldn’t you do it?’ he asked, as if he genuinely wanted to know.
Eva said, ‘All that work. Humping a fourteen-year-old about and getting nothing back. I couldn’t do it.’
Peter said, ‘That’s how I feel. She never smiles, never even acknowledges you when you’ve done something nice for her. Sometimes I think she’s taking the piss. Simone tells me I’m wicked for thinking that. She says I’m stacking up bad karma. She says Abigail is the way she is because of me. She could be right. I done a lot of bad things when I was a kid.’
Eva said, ‘I’m sure it’s nothing you did. Abigail is here for a reason.
Peter asked, ‘What is the reason?’
Eva said, ‘Perhaps it’s to bring out your good side, Pete.’
As he gathered his equipment together to climb down the ladder, he said, Abigail sleeps in our bed now I’m in a single bed in the spare room. I’m living like an old man and I’m only thirty-four. I’ll be growing hairs in my ears next and singing “It’s A Long Fucking Way To Tipperary”.’
He disappeared from view and, moments later, the ladder was removed.
Eva was overwhelmed by Peter’s sad story. She imagined him passing the bedroom where his wife and daughter lay together, before going into the spare room and lying down on the single bed. She started to cry and found that she couldn’t stop.
She eventually slept and dreamed of being stuck on the top of a ladder.
The cordless phone in its flimsy holder startled her with its high-pitched electronic chirp. Eva looked at it with loathing. She hated this phone. She could never remember the combination of beige buttons she had to press to connect her to whoever was phoning. Sometimes a clipped voice informed the caller: ‘Eva and Brian are not available to take your call. Leave a message after the beep.’ Eva would run out of the room and close the door. Later, she would listen to the caller’s message in an agony of embarrassment.
Eva tried to answer the phone but activated a message from the answering machine that she had not heard before. She wanted to run but, trapped in bed, all she could do was barricade her ears with pillows. Even so, her mother’s voice came through.
‘Eva! Eva? Oh, I hate these bleddy answerwhatsits! I’m ringing to tell you that Mrs Whatsit, the one who kept the wool shop, you know the one – tall, thin, big Adam’s apple, always knitting, knit, knit, knit, had a little mongol boy what she put in a home, called him Simon, which is quite cruel when you think about it – her name’s gone right out of my… it begins with a “B”. That’s it! Pamela Oakfield! Well, she’s dead! Found her in the shop. She fell on one
