The Woman Who Went to Bed for a Year (38 page)

His wife had scolded, ‘Ha! So, now you are playing
with robots? You are going back to university to do a degree in electronics and
then a masters in robotics? By then you will be seventy years old, you fat
fool! And I will be dead of starvation, and our children will be sweeping the
gutters!’

As he stacked the instant rice, Mr Barthi wished fervently
that he had not spoken so openly to his wife. It was already a sad day for him.
Mrs Yvonne Beaver was a good customer and an interesting conversationalist,
unlike her son.

He also missed Mrs Eva Beaver. He used to buy a
crate of Heinz tomato soup from the cash and carry especially for her. She ate
a bowl for her lunch every day. Nobody else in her family liked it, they had
their own favourites.

Back
in Bowling Green Road, there were shouts and insults being traded by opposing
groups in the crowd. The vampire worshippers were berating the Harry Potter
faction.

In an attempt to block out the noise, Eva had set
herself the task of remembering all her favourite songs from childhood to the
present day. She had started with Max Bygraves, ‘I’m A Pink Toothbrush’, then
moved on to the Walker Brothers, ‘The Sun Ain’t Gonna Shine (Anymore)’, and was
presently struggling to remember Amy Winehouse’s ‘Back To Black’. She knew she
had a good voice, with perfect pitch. It offended her when professional singers
strayed from a note.

Miss Bailey, her music teacher at school, had
entered her into the County Music Festival. Eva was to perform a solo classic,
Schubert’s ‘The Trout’, to a panel of weary judges. At the end, she had looked
at their smiling faces, automatically assuming they were laughing at her, and
had run from the platform, down long corridors and into a garden with benches
where the other contestants were eating their packed lunches. They had all
stared at her.

At school assembly on Monday morning, the headmistress,
Miss Fosdyke, announced after prayers that Eva Brown-Bird had won the Gold
Medal at the County Music Festival. Eva was shocked, and she found the
thunderous applause unbearable. She had blushed and lowered her head. When Miss
Fosdyke called for her to come up on the stage, she pushed her way along the
rows of girls and escaped through the nearest door. As she walked towards the
cloakroom, she heard loud laughter from the hall. Finding it impossible to stay
in the school, she had collected her coat and satchel and walked in miserable
drenching rain around the area where she lived, until it was the legitimate
time to go home.

55

When
the funeral party arrived back at the house, the crowd growled its displeasure
at Brian and Titania. Then, after a gesture from Alexander, they grew silent.
Photographs of Yvonne’s funeral had already been posted on the internet. Some
of the regulars had twittered their worries that access to the lavatory would
cease with her passing.

As soon as the mourners were gathered inside the
hall, they heard Eva singing a familiar tune. ‘I stood upon the shore, And
watched in sweet peace, The cheery fish’s bath, In the clear little brook.’

Titania whispered to Ruby, ‘It’s Schubert, “The
Trout”.’

Ruby said, ‘Why are people always telling me things
I already know?’

When Eva switched to German, Ruby joined in.
‘Ich
stand an dem Gestade, Und sah in süβer Ruh, Des muntern Fischleins Bade,
Im klaren Bächlein
zu
.’

The group looked at each other and smiled, and Brianne
said, ‘Yeah, go G’ma.’

Ruby said, without modifying her voice, ‘She practised
that bleddy song in English and German for weeks on end. It nearly drove me
mad.’

Eva shouted down the stairs, ‘Yes, and where’s my
gold medal now, Mum?’

‘Oh, not that bleddy medal again! Get over it, Eva!’

Ruby said to Stanley, ‘She knew I hated clutter. She
should have put it away somewhere safe.’

Stanley smiled, he was a tidy man himself.

She hobbled to the bottom of the stairs and shouted
up, ‘It weren’t real gold anyway!’

Much
later, when Eva asked Brianne how the funeral had gone, she said, ‘Brian Junior
made a dick of himself giving the eulogy, but it was OK. Nobody cried, except
Dad.’

‘Couldn’t you have squeezed a tear out, Brianne?
Surely it’s only good manners to cry at a funeral.’

Brianne said, ‘You’re such a hypocrite! I thought
you were all for truth and beauty, and all that nineteenth century shit.’

Brianne was angry and disappointed that Alexander
had paid her such little attention. He had spent no more time with her than he
had with the rest of the family. OK, so he didn’t love her. But he ought to
have acknowledged that they had a close bond. She had managed to sit next to
him in the church, but she could have been a sack of old potatoes for all he
cared.

He had disrespected her. She was upset. She needed
to tell her online friends how she felt. She went into Brian Junior’s bedroom,
and fired up her laptop.

He was already online, posting to Twitter. He typed:

Gran y = worm
bait. She rollin’ rollin’ rollin’ towards non-existent Jesus.

He switched tabs to the Facebook group set up in honour
of his mother. Using one of his troll accounts, he began to slag off the crowd
outside his house, with particular reference to Sandy Lake. He ended his
diatribe by updating the troll account status to ‘Anybody got a spare grenade?’

Brianne was on the same site, using her own name.
She typed:

There’s a skanky
black wasteman outside my front door. He thinks he’s a doorman, but he should
impose a dress code on himself cos his locks are rank like dead donkey’s tails.
Cut ‘em off, granddad.

Alexander
was standing on the doorstep, illuminated by the porch light. He was wearing
his navy-blue Crombie overcoat and smoking a cigarette.

There were several desperate cries, people begging
to see Eva before the evening deadline. She had started to give an audience to
five people each day. Who she saw was determined by Alexander, who picked a
surprisingly varied bunch of representatives from the crowd.

This afternoon’s consultations had included a 5
7-year-old whose mother wanted to marry a man in his seventies — how could she
stop her?

Eva had said, ‘You don’t stop her, you buy her a
bottle of champagne and give them your blessing.’

The second was a feather enthusiast who believed that
Eva was hiding a fine set of wings. Eva had turned round, pulled her T-shirt up
to her neck and showed the enthusiast her unadorned back.

There was a teenage girl who told Eva that she
wanted to die and join Kurt Cobain in his crib in heaven. And there was a
super-obese American man who had flown from New Orleans, having paid for two
Business Class seats, to tell Eva that she was a reincarnation of Marilyn
Monroe, and he would like to ‘conversate’ with her.

And, of course, there were the recently bereaved who
could not bear the harsh reality that they would never see their loved ones
again. They sent notes and photographs, asking Eva to speak to their dead and
relay messages from them to the living. Eva worked hard to damp down the
emotion in her room. She began to turn away if there were tears.

Alexander ground his cigarette out under his boot
and threw it into the gutter. He spoke quietly to Sandy, saying, ‘That’s it for
tonight. Listen to your good side. No shouting to Eva tonight. Have some
respect. There’s been a funeral here today.’

That
night, when Alexander had settled Venus and Thomas in their beds in Brian
Junior’s old room, he looked out of the window before getting into bed himself.
He saw that the only person left on the opposite pavement was Sandy Lake,
sitting outside her tent.

She had made herself as comfortable as possible,
supplementing her Karrimat with a cardboard and newspaper mattress. With the
aid of a head torch, she was reading a magazine dedicated to angel-worshipping
celebrities.

Alexander pushed the window sash up a little to let
in some air. Sandy looked up immediately, and there was something about her
stillness that disturbed him. He closed the window and locked it.

Sandy was down in the dumps tonight. Penelope had
abandoned her and gone home to nurse her bronchitis. Sandy had been here for
the longest, and still hadn’t had a proper audience with Eva. She needed more than
a ten-minute session. Eva had been promising her another consultation, but for
some reason it kept getting postponed, and Sandy was losing her patience. She
needed to tell Eva her life story — how unkind people had been to her
throughout her life, and how, when she went to the shops around the corner and
talked to Mr Barthi about Eva and the angels, he would refuse to listen.

He had said to her recently, ‘Your nonsense is lost
to me. I am an agnostic.’

It was Alexander’s fault. It was he who was keeping
her from Eva. He was jealous, because Sandy had become the world’s
self-appointed expert on the Eva phenomenon. Her scrapbooks had more press
clippings than any of the other Eva fans, and she could recite, by heart, the
highlights of Eva’s rise to celebritydom. Her iPad had links to every
Eva-related site and blog, and she was proud of the efficiency of her news
alerts, which constantly searched for Eva updates.

She was the main source for the dissemination of,
and misinformation about, Eva’s supposed spiritual powers. Sandy was prone to
exaggeration, describing a fictional audience with Eva as being, ‘In the
presence of an unworldly being. She has an ethereal beauty that cannot be
matched in the whole of the world. And every word she speaks is wise and true.’

When pressed by newcomers to the crowd to reveal
what Eva had said that was so impressive, Sandy would wipe her eyes and say, ‘Sorry,
I always mist up when speaking of Eva …’ Then, after what her audience found
to be an infuriatingly extended pause, she would say, ‘Eva spake unto me and
the words she did say were for my ears alone. But when I was backing out of her
room, I saw her rise from the bed and hover there for a few seconds. She was
giving me a sign! It was Eva’s way of telling me that I have been chosen.’

When cynics questioned Sandy and asked, ‘Chosen for
what?’ the chosen one would reply, in sanctimonious tones, ‘I’m waiting for
another sign, it will come from the sky.’

Sandy needed Eva to address the world and tell all
the countries that were at war to stop. And to help all the kiddies who had no
water or food. She was sure that the world would listen to Eva, and then there
would be joy in angel heaven, and there would be no more fighting, no floods or
famines or earthquakes. There would be peace and joy and love throughout the
world, so it was imperative that she talk to Eva.

What could be more important?

She looked up at Eva’s lighted window, said a prayer
and climbed inside her tent, where William Wainwright was sleeping like a baby
on barbiturates.

It
seemed to Eva that every time she looked out of the window, she saw Sandy Lake
looking up at her with a beatific smile. The woman had ruined her view of the
world outside.

Earlier that evening, Eva had cursed and said to
Alexander, ‘Does that crazy woman never sleep?’

Alexander said, ‘Even when she does sleep, she keeps
her eyes open. But don’t worry, I’m next door. Just knock on the wall if you
need me.’

56

In
late February, after the twins had returned to Leeds, they settled back into
Sentinel Towers with relief— it was impossible to do any serious work in
Bowling Green Road. According to Brian Junior, the doorbell rang on a mean
average of 9.05 times per hour.

They decided that they would work together from now
on. Each would help the other with their essays and assignments, leaving them
more time to spend on their Special Projects.

They started with their finances and sold their mother’s
gift of jewellery in a Cash Generator in the city centre. They agreed that in
future they would not allow sentiment to influence their plans.

In the second week of their second term, they had
successfully hacked into the university’s accommodation records and changed the
status of their accounts from ‘Rent Arrears’ to ‘Rent Paid in Full until 2013’.
The day after this triumph, which brought each of them an extra £400 a month,
they went shopping for clothes.

They sat down on a sofa opposite the changing rooms
in Debenhams and talked for a long time about their lives and what they wanted
in the future.

Brianne confessed that if she couldn’t have Alexander,
she wouldn’t have any man.

Brian Junior told Brianne that he would never marry.
‘I’m not sexually attracted to women or to men,’ he said.