Flying Under Bridges (5 page)

Plums. Plums
everywhere. The one product Eve had bought to show how fresh and healthy her
life was. She bent down and gathered up the bright red fruit, but there was one
stuck under the radiator and Eve couldn’t get to it. Eve couldn’t get to it
partly because it had rolled too far under and partly because of Tom’s stuffed
otter.

Eve’s
son, Tom, dabbled in taxidermy and the stuffed-animal presence of his hobby was
felt throughout much of the house. He had left the otter there to dry one
winter and never collected the thing. It was an odd creature, captured in a
moment of whatever makes an otter insane with delight. It had been stuffed to
sit up on its hind legs with a smile to make a dentist moist with pleasure. It
sat grinning at Eve while she lay on the floor with a knitting needle and tried
to poke the plum out. At last she managed to jab the Houdini of the fruit
basket with the end of the needle and the point came out all red. Like it was
bleeding. Eve had been bleeding a lot recently. Most days she was preoccupied
with either going to or coming from ‘sorting myself out’. She had seen the
doctor. He had told her ‘something must be done’, but she didn’t want to go
again. She couldn’t bear the indignity of it. The flat on your back trying to ‘relax’
of it.

‘If you
had a hysterectomy, Mrs Marshall, then it would all be over,’ the doctor said,
as if he could possibly know anything about it.

Why do
so many men go into gynaecology? What leads a young man to a life up to his
elbows in vaginas? It would all be over if she had the operation. They would
vacuum out Eve’s functions and it would all be over, but she just couldn’t. She
just couldn’t and she didn’t know why.

‘It’s a
very common operation,’ continued the doctor. ‘Why, in America a third of all
women have had their wombs removed by the time they are sixty.’

Eve
looked at the man who was dealing with her mysterious body. He stood there,
confident that he alone could untangle Eve’s defective structure. His white
coat merely hid his blue tights and red underpants. He was able to cure the
uncurable. Stop a woman seeping in a single bound. A professional ready to
lance her body as if it were an abscess.

Eve
never discussed it with Adam. She knew he wouldn’t like the actual word. Womb.
He couldn’t bear anything to do with women’s problems. It was bad enough that
he lived in monthly terror that she might discharge something on the sheets at
night. Constant bleeding would be intolerable. Eve was unclean.

She lay
on the floor looking at the plum blood. She thought of her face reflected in
the foil and it occurred to her not to get up at all, but she would have been
too easy a target for Claudette so she rose and went to the loo. These were big
daily decisions. This was Eve’s life.

Chapter
Four

4
January

Holloway
Prison for Women

London

My dear Inge,

And
Lillian and Derek begat Eve

It is not the old that are wise, nor the

aged that understand what is right

(JOB
3.9)

Thank you so much for your
letter and the photograph of the flat. It looks lovely. All that Caribbean sun.
It’s funny. I always wanted Shirley to travel. I just didn’t think it would be
like this. I don’t know why she went with you. I don’t suppose any of us knows
why anything happened, but thank you. I know you’ll look after her.

The
psychiatrist wants to know about my childhood. He keeps saying that there has
to be an explanation. It’s what we all want, isn’t it? We don’t like things we
don’t understand. I think that’s why people have religion. To get rid of the
uncertainty of everything. Something bizarre happens and people nod and say, ‘Well,
God moves in mysterious ways,’ and that’s that sorted out. I have an
explanation for what happened but I’m sure it won’t do, so the shrink and I
relentlessly seek out an answer. I don’t know what it is he wants — a bad nappy
change when I was four or a difficult relationship with tricycles or something.
There just has to be some blame. What happened has to be somebody or something’s
fault.

‘Were
you happy as a child?’

And I
think about that and the answer is — yes. Very. Mum and Dad were the happiest
couple in our street. He was so gentle, my dad. Do you remember him? Never said
a word against anyone. He was a builder. A good builder. An unusual builder
because everyone loved him.

‘Please,
Mr Cameron, we’re desperate. You’re the only one we can rely on.’

Cameron
Builders and Decorators, which sounded like an army but it was just him. He
built and decorated all day and then came home and did the same for Mother. The
garden was stunning. He used to work in it all weekend and Mother would come
out and say, ‘What have you put the azaleas there for? They can’t go there.’

And he
would smile at me and say, ‘How’s my lovely Eve? How’s Daddy’s girl?’

I still
miss him. The smell of his jumper. The feel of his arms around me. He played
the piano and sometimes Mother would stand in the door with a dishcloth and
stop for a second to listen. It was the only time she was quiet. I thought
things were perfect till he died. I thought I understood how he and Mum worked.
I don’t know if you knew but Dad passed away at the end of February last year.
It was near the end of March when we went to Mum’s for the will reading. I’m
sure everyone thought it would just be straightforward, but it wasn’t. It was a
terrible day. Partly because of the will and partly because Adam caught his willie
in his trouser zip. I don’t think he and I were ever the same again after that.

Adam’s
Defective Trouser Department

… you
wives, be submissive to your husbands…

(1 PETER
3.1)

I remember we were late
leaving for the lunch but I could hear Adam was in a terrible state.

‘Eve!
Eve!’ he screamed from the bedroom in anguish that could only be
life-threatening. I was busy in the bathroom. I’d been having a few problems,
bleeding and that, but Adam was calling, so I patched myself up quickly and
sprayed sprays of different kinds to hide any possible smell. It’s a worry for
women, isn’t it? Smell. Anyway, I hid my secret pads and bits in the under-sink
cupboard. Adam never looks in that cupboard. It holds the risk of
cleaning
things.
Then I ran to our room. Adam was standing in the middle of the
bedroom with tears streaming down his cheeks. His face was all twisted with
pain. I thought he’d had a heart attack.

I ran
to the phone. ‘I’ll get the doctor.’

‘No!’
he squeaked. ‘You can’t!’

‘Why
ever not?’

Adam
could hardly speak. ‘It’s caught.’ He moaned through a sort of coughing sound,
and indeed it was caught. The very edge of Adam’s ‘little friend’ had caught in
the zip of his trousers. I always think it’s a very odd part of the male body. Funny
little dangly thing with a will of its own. I haven’t said that to anyone else.
Maybe these are the crazy things. It was not a time for me to think such
thoughts. This was very serious. If we did not remove our little friend from
his trap, it was quite possible the house might fall down.

‘It
needs cream,’ I said.

‘You
can’t touch it!’ he screamed through clenched teeth.

‘Lie
down,’ I said, and went to get the Oil of Ulay. Adam lay face-up on the bed and
I gently wiped on cream with some cotton wool. The middle of the morning — what
would people think? It was a very slow operation but we managed to secure
freedom. The lesion left behind was tiny but devastating. Little lamb. He could
hardly walk.

We sat
looking at his penis with great reverence. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d
seen it in daylight. Poor thing looked rather tired. I’ve never written the
word penis before. Penis. Sounds much tidier than the real thing. Do you
remember Miss Cadman, English Lang and Lit, fifth year? It took her a whole
term to tell us that a ‘pity’ in art was a nude. We all thought she was going
to faint dead away when you made her explain what it meant. Penis. Pity. Don’t
tell Shirley all this. It isn’t necessary. I don’t think children want to know
that their parents have genitalia at all, let alone bits which they’ve
injured. I wondered if we couldn’t have insured against damage to the thing? We
had insurance for everything else.

‘Do you
think it’s serious?’ Adam asked, as he examined the wound thoroughly.

‘No’ I
said, aware that I was bleeding again. Gushing and seeping.

‘You
mustn’t tell anyone,’ he kept saying through. clenched teeth. Who was I going
to tell? We were going to lunch with Mother.

News,
Mother? Well, Adam caught his privates in his zip this morning. I know,
fifty-five! You’d think he would have got the hang of it by now.

We went
to have coffee in the kitchen. He thought it would calm him down. Despite his
pain, Adam tutted as I picked up the newspapers from the hall table. He thinks
it is a new extravagance on my part that I have the
Guardian
delivered
as well as the
Daily Mail.
I tell him I don’t want the
Daily Mail.
I
want to see what’s happening in the world.

‘There’s
no point in reading all that foreign news because there’s nothing we can do
about it,’ he says. Adam mostly likes the local paper and cuts out long bits
about planting your onions out early. ‘You should stop worrying about something
that is none of your business and concentrate on things you can do. Like the
garden,’ he said, while I poured the coffee. He was right. I shouldn’t be
sitting there. Not while there was fruit to be removed from under the hall
radiator.

We
settled down. He flicked through the
Mail
while I read my paper. I
remember because that’s what always happened.

‘There’s
a Japanese cult in the paper who say there’s going to be Armageddon in
September,’ I’d say, and he’d reply, because he wasn’t listening, ‘I don’t
think we’re doing anything in September.’

Then Adam
chuckled to himself and stabbed a finger at his tabloid. ‘This is good,’ he
said. ‘This is very good. They’ve got this photo of a Filipino man who’s been
caught eating his dead partner’s hand. What do you think the headline is?’

‘I don’t
know,’ I said.

Adam
could hardly tell me for laughing. ‘What Are You Doing for the Rest of Your
Wife? Isn’t that great?’ He looked disappointed at my reaction. ‘I thought you’d
like it. It’s foreign news.’

I
looked at him, my husband.

‘Adam,
do you love me?’

‘What?
Don’t be silly. What’s brought this on? Don’t I look after you? Give you a nice
home?’

And he
does. He has stood by me. He came to visit me here and we both pretended
nothing had really happened. We pretended that someone will realise the car
was terribly faulty and it couldn’t possibly have been anything to do with me.

I went
back to my paper. They only have the rubbish ones in here so I have nothing
else to read. I don’t know if I mind. I am beginning to wonder what the point
of all the news is. I mean, it floods into our houses day after day and none of
us do anything about it. What is the point in knowing if we’re just going to
carry on the same as usual anyway? Did you know that the Turkish government is
doing horrid things to the Kurds? I saw a programme on it and I kept thinking,
What should I do about this? What can I do? These people might join the Common
Market.

I used
to watch the television news in the kitchen. Adam bought me a portable for my
birthday. I know he wanted it for gardening programmes, but Dixons happened to
be running a special offer the week of my birthday so it rather fitted in.

Fact
—
the first real television station was built in Berlin in 1935
in anticipation of the Olympic Games where Hitler behaved so beautifully. The
BBC did the first live journalistic reporting in 1937 for the coronation of
King George VI. Imagine living in an age when seeing royalty on the telly was a
rarity. The smallest video screen available is less than one inch across
—
about
the size of a postage stamp. It’s called Private Eye and was dreamed up by some
American called Allen Becker. Apparently you have to hold it really close to
your eye to watch. Tricky if you want friends round to watch Wimbledon.

I think
Adam thought a telly in the kitchen would keep me quiet at night. I don’t
sleep, you see. Not properly. Haven’t for ages. It’s the dreams. They won’t
leave me alone. I think it mainly started when Shirley was born. I used to lie
awake with her cot right next to my head, listening to her every move and
willing her to breathe till morning.