The Woman Who Went to Bed for a Year (34 page)

Eva confided, ‘I went to Paris when I was sixteen.
My God! Every morning I woke up in a different place, but at least I knew I was
living.
’

Neither woman was used to outward shows of affection,
but they clung to each other for a few moments before Eva let Amber’s mother
go.

When she’d left, Eva stared at the white wall
opposite, until Amber and Jade had been pushed into a compartment in the very
back of her mind. A place that Eva thought of as the hidden side of the moon.

50

As
a journey begins with one step, so a crowd begins to collect with one person.
Sandy Lake was an aggressively English 41-year-old who thought that if she wore
eye-catching colours and a wacky hat, people would be deceived into thinking
that she had a ‘quirky, off-beat’ personality. She had been one of the first to
shout, ‘Come on, Tim!’ from her seat on Centre Court at Wimbledon — once,
daringly, after the umpire had called for silence. She had been reprimanded by
the Asian umpire, which she thought was a bit rich.

She had read about Eva on Twitter. Many tweeters
said that Eva was a wise woman who had taken to her bed as a protest against
how horrid the world was, what with wars and famine, and little babies dying
and stuff (though it was partly their mothers’ fault for having too many
children and choosing to live miles from the nearest waterhole). She had also
read on SingletonsNet that Eva could contact the dead and see into the future.

Sandy felt compelled to be near to Eva. So, the day
before yesterday, she had travelled from Dulwich to the pavement opposite Eva’s
house, equipped with a popup tent, sleeping bag, a thermal mat, a folding
chair, a tiny Primus stove and a box of army rations in case of emergency.

She had researched Eva’s immediate environs and
found a pleasant parade of shops. She needed to be within easy walking distance
of a newsagent’s. She laughed to others that she was slightly addicted to her
celebrity magazines. Nothing gave her more pleasure than seeing a picture of
Carol Vorderman with an arrow pointing to her cellulite.

Sandy had inherited the large detached house in Dulwich.
It was full of dark heavy furniture, Wilton rugs and swagged curtains. When she
was at home, she lived in the kitchen and rarely ventured into the rest of the
house. She kept her few clothes on a rail in the former butler’s pantry and
slept inside her sleeping bag, on the battered sofa that Mum and Dad’s dogs had
slept on.

She had resisted taking ‘silly money’ for the house.
She knew it was worth over a million pounds, and that it was a ‘highly
desirable residence’, but she had heard that estate agents were untruthful and
untrustworthy, and she did not have a best friend to give her advice about
money and things.

But she’d got millions of online friends! It was
they who told her where the best queue would be forming, or the whereabouts of
the next demonstration to be taking place. She had walked to Trafalgar Square
on numerous occasions for many disparate causes. She had no politics of her
own. She marched with everybody, from the Palestine Liberation Organization to
the Sons of Zion, and had a jolly good time with them all. They were all lovely
people.

Her favourite queue of all was the line-up for
Centre Court tickets at Wimbledon, closely followed by the promenaders who
waited alongside the Albert Hall for the few available standing tickets for the
Last Night of the Proms. Sandy knew all the words to ‘Land Of Hope And Glory’.

In 1999, she had become so excited by the orchestra’s
rendition of ‘The Floral Dance’ that she had agreed to have sexual intercourse
round the back of the Albert Hall with Malcolm Ferret, a pale teacher with
ginger lashes. She couldn’t remember much about their tryst, only that she had
not been able to remove the brick dust from her pale-green polar fleece. She
had spotted Malcolm in the queue the following year, but he had ignored her
little wave and pretended to be absorbed in the wrapper of the Snickers bar he
was eating.

One of her highlights of the year had been the
launch of the latest iPad. The orderly mob outside the Regent Street Apple
Store had been semi-hysterical. They were a very much younger crowd, but Sandy
told them she was young at heart and knew plenty of modern phrases, such as ‘drag
and drop’. She also knew very modern words such as ‘dreg’ and ‘dro’. She knew
she impressed the young men around her when she employed these terms.

It seemed to Sandy that she was constantly renewing
her technological appliances. It was a good job for her that Mum and Dad had
left money in the bank. But what would happen if the money ran out and she was
left behind with obsolete technology, and the prospect of never catching up?

There was always somewhere to go. The post-Christmas
sales in Oxford Street were great fun because otherwise Sandy would not speak
to anybody over the Christmas period. True, she had been caught up and knocked
down in a stampede for the half-price cutlery in Selfridges, but she had picked
herself up and managed to snatch a soup ladle before being knocked down again.

Sandy was never lonely, there was always a queue she
could join. It didn’t matter to her if she was thirty years older than those
around her. Neither did she mind admitting that she had once pushed an
unaccompanied child out of the way in the last Harry Potter queue. There had
been a limited number of signed special editions — and those books were far too
good for children, anyway. She had felt desolate when JKR had announced there
were to be no more HP books. She consoled herself with fan fiction on
MuggieNet.

And now she had her Eva, her beautiful Eva.

Sandy was not sure how long Eva would stay in bed
—but whatever happened, she knew that 2012 was going to be a big year for her.
There would be many returned-ticket queues she could join for the Olympics.
There was the launch of the iPad 3, and the iPhone 5. And her trip to
Disneyland in Florida was already booked. She had heard that the attractions
were spectacular, and that the lines for these marvels sometimes moved so
slowly that at peak times it could take two hours to reach the head of the
queue. By then, she would have made many new friends from around the world.

After
only an hour on the pavement opposite Eva’s house, whilst Sandy was struggling
in a cruel east wind to keep her tent from blowing away, she was joined by Penelope,
who believed that angels lived amongst us and that Eva was undoubtedly ‘a very
senior angel’ who had been caught between heaven and earth. And the reason she
had gone to bed was that she needed to hide her wings.

When a white feather flew out of Eva’s window, was
caught in the wind and landed near Sandy’s feet, Penelope said, ‘See! I told
you!’ She added, in awed tones, ‘It’s a sign that your own personal angel is at
your shoulder.’

Sandy was an instant believer.

When she thought about it, she realised that she had
always liked angels, and her favourite carol was ‘Hark The Herald Angels Sing’.
Yes, it all made sense now:

Daddy had called her ‘my little angel’, even though
she was twice the size of him. Now she was fifteen stone eleven pounds,
dangerously near the weight limit of her folding chair.

Eva
first saw Sandy and Penelope when she woke from a deep, dreamless sleep.

She looked out of the window at two middle-aged
women on the opposite pavement, one wearing a fun Noddy hat with a bell on the
end, the other using binoculars that were trained on her window.

They both waved, and Eva automatically waved back —
before dipping down out of sight.

Two
miles away, Abdul Anwar sat at the kitchen table yawning, watching his wife
fill his tiffin tin with small aluminium containers with screw-on lids. He
glanced down at the photographs of Eva and his fellow taxi driver Barry Wooton
on the torn-out front page of the
Leicester Mercury.

Abdul’s wife, Aisha, was cooking chapattis for the
evening meal — though Abdul would not be there. He was about to go on night
shift. She always made him a meal, which he ate from his collection of silvery
aluminium pots. His children called it ‘Dad’s picnic’.

He said, ‘Aisha, be sure to post a copy of the
article to our family. I have spoken to them before about my friend Barry.’

She said, ‘I won’t send it by snail mail, I’ll scan
it in. You are still living in the past, Abdul.’

While both of her hands were occupied with a chapatti,
Abdul got up and put his arms around her waist. He glanced down at the flat pan
where his wife was pressing the uncooked side of a chapatti with a bunched-up
tea towel. When she flipped it over with her fingers, he gasped and said, ‘May
Allah be blessed! It is the woman in bed, the saint!’

Aisha said, ‘Praise be to God!’ and turned the stove
off.

They examined the chapatti together. It looked uncannily
like Eva’s face. The black and brown well-done pieces made up her eyes,
eyebrows, lips and nostrils. Her hair was represented by the excess chapatti
flour. Abdul brought the front page to the stove and compared the two. Neither
man nor wife could quite believe what they were looking at.

Aisha said, ‘We will wait for it to cool. It may
change.’ She hoped it wouldn’t change. She remembered when the Hindu baker had
found Elvis Presley in a doughnut. The shop had been besieged. Then, after
three days of exposure, Elvis had looked more like Keith Vaz, the local MP, who
had subsequently increased his majority at the next general election.

When the chapatti was cold, Abdul took photographs
and filmed Aisha at the stove, standing between Eva’s picture and what Anwar
was later to call ‘the blessed chapatti’ on Radio Leicester.

After Abdul had left for work, forgetting his tiffin
tin in the excitement, Aisha sat at the computer desk in the space beneath the
stairs. She created a Facebook page for ‘The Woman in Bed’ in ten minutes, then
set up a link to her own page, calling it ‘Eva — the saint appears in Aisha
Anwar’s chapatti’. It was a thrill for her to press the key that sent it to her
423 friends.

By
next morning, Bowling Green Road was chock-a-block with cars. There was a
cacophony of car horns, Bollywood music and excited and angry voices as people
tried to park.

Ruby was flustered when she opened the door to three
bearded men, who asked if they could see the ‘Special One’. Ruby said, ‘Not
today, thank you,’ and closed the door.

Meanwhile, queues had formed outside Aisha Anwar’s house,
and she was obliged to take them through to see the resemblance between Wali
Eva’ and the face on the chapatti. Aisha was also obliged to offer her visitors
food and drink, but after hearing one of them say, in a loud whisper, ‘Her
kitchen’s a seventies
antique.
Those orange tiles!’ she regretted her
impulsiveness, and fantasized about eating the Eva chapatti with aloo gobi and
dhal.

51

Over
the next week, Eva remembered more of what she had learned at her junior and
secondary schools. The world’s longest river. The capital of Peru. Which countries
constitute Scandinavia. The nine times table. How many pints there were in a
gallon. How many inches in a yard. Britain’s principal manufacturing
industries. How many soldiers were killed on the first day of the First World
War. How old was Juliet. The poetry she had learned by heart: ‘I must go down
to the seas again, to the lonely sea and the sky’, ‘Hail to thee, blithe
Spirit!’, ‘Fools! For I also had my hour; / One far fierce hour and sweet’. And
during this time, the crowd grew and became a constant background noise.

There were complaints from the neighbours about the
inconvenience, and the parking problem escalated. But it wasn’t until some of
the residents were unable to park in their own road and were forced to leave
their cars half a mile or more away that the police became involved.

Unfortunately, Constable Gregory Hawk found it
impossible to park anywhere near Eva’s house, and had to walk an uncomfortably
long distance. When he finally reached the front door, he found Ruby sitting
outside in the early spring sunshine, selling tea and slices of fruit cake from
a trestle table in Eva’s front garden. She had put a daffodil in a posy vase on
the table to help attract customers, and was charging variable rates which were
entirely dependent on whether or not she liked the look of them.

PC Hawk was about to ascertain whether Ruby had a
trading licence and a food hygiene certificate, and had completed the paperwork
for a risk assessment, when he was diverted by an outside broadcast truck that
was backing down the road, only narrowly avoiding the cars parked on either
side. After informing the driver that there was nowhere legal to park, he
returned to the trestle table in time to hear Ruby shouting, ‘Next for the
toilets!’ and to see a man in Druid’s headgear and robes leave the house, while
a woman with ‘Eva’ painted on her forehead entered.

PC Hawk tried to remember whether charging the
public to visit a private lavatory was a civil or criminal offence.