Flying Under Bridges

by Sandi Toksvig

  The great Shirley Bassey no doubt wallowed daily in the impact she had had on many lives, but she was perhaps unaware of the integral part she played in Adam and Eve’s marriage. When Eve married Adam she might have guessed the full extent of his obsession with the Welsh singer as they had a serious discussion about his bride-to-be processing up the aisle to a recording of ‘Big Spender’. Over the years it had become clear that if Dame Shirley ever arrived in Edenford with a gleam in her eye, Adam, Eve’s devoted husband, would be off in a second. Eve looked at Adam out of the corner of her eye while she drove. He sat with his hands cupped over his injury.

  She loved him and he loved her, but perhaps not with the passion he reserved for the two focuses of his life — Shirley Bassey and avocado plants. It was a curious combination, but Adam had made it a life’s work. He had all of Shirley’s recordings and he was hoping to be ‘avocado self-sufficient’ by the following year. It was, at least, an ambition.

  Every time Eve and Adam had an avocado, he would take out the pip, put a matchstick in either side and hang it over a glass of water. Once it had sprouted he’d plant it in one of the big tubs on the bedroom windowsill (south facing — best light). Eve hated them. She watched them grow thin and tall and could feel them suck the sunlight out of the room. They had never had an avocado from them in the many years he had been doing it, but Adam was not a man easily swayed from his path of purpose.

  He had the same single-minded attitude to many things. Like not eating certain Eastern foods. ‘They’re bound to have used cats and dogs for the meat,’ he would say, and Eve would think about that. To her it seemed ridiculous. Why would anyone bother? It had to be twice as difficult chasing around in the dark for a stray moggy than popping down Dewhurst’s of a Saturday morning. Why would any restaurant not just go to a butcher? Save all that ‘Here pussy, pussy’, followed by fur stripping and eyes down every time you saw a hand-made ‘beloved pet missing’ poster on a telegraph pole. ‘A pound of mince and a nice chump chop please,’ simply had to be easier. But Adam was sure he was right and that was that.

  Eve’s mother had made a special effort with the lunch. Her husband’s will reading was an important family occasion, although no one was expecting fireworks. There was no anticipation of anything exciting. He had been a local builder. There was unlikely to be a secret slush fund in the Cayman Islands. Still, Mrs Cameron had really laboured over the meal and it was important that everyone realised the full extent of the effort.

  As Adam and Eve arrived at the family home, Ravel’s ‘Bolero’ was booming out of every casement. Adam, his eyes closed with pain, his hand cupped as a flesh codpiece for his injury, waited for Eve to ring the bell. It still seemed odd to Eve to ring the bell at her own home, the place where she had grown up, but it was polite. There was a small cry from the kitchen and in a moment Mrs Cameron could be seen through the glass front door, wearing her frilly apron, flour in her hair and with a face as red as a baboon’s bottom. Mrs Cameron had a bad limp, but despite this she appeared to be attempting to glide across the parquet floor.

  ‘Dum, da, da, da, dum, da, da, da … dee, da da dee da da deeee!’ She opened the door with a flourish, her arms busy conducting the music as she glided towards daughter and son-in-law. Adam moved to kiss her hello but Mrs Cameron held up a hand.

  ‘Wait … best bit coming up.’ The music swelled and Eve’s mother twirled across the floor as best she could, dragging her left leg behind her. Fortunately Ravel’s piece is a short one, but Adam and Eve must have stood for at least three minutes while she danced before them. Finally the record finished and Adam applauded. Mrs Cameron blushed and took several modest bows.

  ‘The Jane Torvill of your day,’ said Adam, smiling.

  ‘I could have been, I could have been, but then my lovely Eve…’ The sentence trailed off. Eve’s mother could have been a star if it were not for Eve. That was the rest of the unfinished sentence. But for Eve and a terrible jump in the county ice-dance championships, which had finished her leg and her career.

  ‘If only Eve had had the gift.’ Adam knew the conversation and helped keep it going each time. Eve silently blessed him.

  ‘My lovely Eve,’ said her mother. ‘She was worth it, but yes, it would have been nice. I think we knew by the time you were four, didn’t we, darling? You could no more skate than…’

  ‘Reinvent the mousetrap.’ Eve finished the sentence and everyone laughed at how she had ruined everything.

  Mother gave a little sigh and wiped her nose with a hanky from her apron pocket. ‘Anyway… Hello, my dears!’ Not one for physical contact, she handed out pretend hugs all round which only soothed the air. ‘Bless you, bless you both.’ She made a little sign of the cross in the air. The papal greeting of Edenford.

  ‘How lovely. All my family. Did you have trouble with the… who ha?’

  ‘The car? No,’ Eve said, trying to ignore Adam’s slight limp as he went up the steps. He was limping on the opposite side to Mother. She realised that if they walked too close together, they could bang heads.

  ‘No?’ Mother looked quizzical. ‘It’s just that you’re the teensiest bit late. Nothing important, but I was hoping you would help set the table..

  There was always something. Eve smiled. ‘I’ll do it now.’

  ‘Oh darling, of course, I’ve done it myself. Don’t worry, it was a pleasure.’ Mrs Cameron sighed with the burden of her pleasures. ‘Adam! Congratulations on your promotion. You clever boy!’

  Adam smiled and you could just see how he must have looked when he was picked for the second eleven at school. ‘Thanks. I may have to go into the office later.’

  Mother nodded. ‘Of course.’ The pressure of the insurance business. Adam was now a divisional manager and the division could hardly manage without him. ‘Thomas?’ mother enquired.

  ‘He’s busy,’ Eve said quickly. Tom didn’t ‘do’ family functions and Eve was tired of hearing about it. It was his life and he was entitled to it. He was doing what he thought was right and Eve was proud of that.

  ‘Of course.’ Mother leant forward and whispered although there was no one else around, ‘Still living in a tent?’ Eve nodded. ‘Still gripped by that foreign religion, is he?’

  ‘Its not him, just some of his friends. They’re Buddhists, Mum. They’re really very nice.’

  ‘It’s still foreign.’

  ‘So’s the pope’ replied Eve, ever defensive of her son. She was immediately admonished.

  ‘May God forgive you!’ Confident that he would, Mother changed tack. ‘Come and look at this.’ The small party limped off to the dining room. Leaning against the wall was a huge brown paper parcel. A great rectangle about four foot high and two foot across. Mother patted it.

  ‘It’s your father,’ she whispered to Eve, and wiped a tear from her eye.

  ‘What is?’ Mr Cameron’s ashes had yet to arrive from the crematorium and Eve half thought that perhaps they had been sent flat packed. Mother carefully peeled off the paper and folded it for reuse at Christmas. Inside a heavily ornate gilt frame was an enormous picture of Eve’s father, Derek Cameron. He was standing in the garden, moving an azalea and smiling slightly. The photograph had been blown up to poster size and was slightly blurred. It made him look cross despite the smile.

  ‘This way he can always be with us,’ sighed Mother. ‘Adam, I neeeed you,’ she implored with a hint of little-girl squeak in her voice. ‘I want him in here. On that.., who ha.’ She pointed to the wall above the sideboard. ‘Would you?’ It was a signal to open the floodgates of manhood.

  ‘No problem, Lillian. Be done in a jiffy.’

  She removed a hammer from her apron pocket and handed it to him. ‘I’ll get you a who ha… picture hook.’

  Adam headed off to be clever with tools and Eve went and stood uselessly in the hall. Mother scuttled past her daughter.

  ‘Don’t scowl, darling, it’s not attractive.’ She disappeared into the kitchen. Eve could hear her uneven tread
on the parquet floor as she almost certainly prepared to do wonders with a melon bailer. Mother had limped ever since her daughter could remember. When she was little, Eve used to imagine her leaping in the air perfectly whole and coming down on the ice a broken woman. It had made Eve feel guilty all her life. Mother had told her many times that had she not been pregnant with Eve then she would never have fallen. If she hadn’t been pregnant, Mother could have been someone. A sequinned toast of the town. Instead she had borne Eve and Eve had borne disappointment. Eve looked in the hall mirror. She was scowling again. Perhaps she had been born scowling.

  Through the arch into the dining room Eve could see the table laid for lunch. The large mahogany surface was entirely covered with a plastic lace tablecloth. The cloth was to protect the table. In forty-five years Eve could never remember seeing the actual table. What was the point in having it if all you did was protect the wretched thing? What was the point?

  Mother had made an arrangement of bright flowers Out of multi-coloured tissue paper. She had learnt to make them in the sixties and had been making them ever since. They were everywhere. Fake flora and fauna in every nook and cranny. Flora and fauna and God. Having given up the sequinned world of ice-skating, Mother had turned to Catholicism for the show business part of her life. It hadn’t been much at first. A few little icons when Eve, Martha and William were growing up. Rather more candles than might be deemed necessary for a power cut, that kind of thing. But since her husband had died it was becoming obsessive. There were velvet pictures of Jesus, which in the right light showed his bleeding heart. Rosaries hung from every framed prayer. Eve’s favourite item was a large clam shell, which, when plugged in, opened to reveal the head of Pope John Paul I. The head would rise a few inches, light up and play ‘Ave Maria’. The pope rose and shone, rose and shone. Eve, useless Eve, stood and played with it for a few minutes looking at the Holy Father. Mother always seemed to know what Eve was doing or thinking. ‘Leave His Holiness’s head alone, Eve. We don’t want him to get broken.’

  Indeed they didn’t, so Eve left the leader of the Catholic world and wandered into the kitchen to be useless in there. Mother was very carefully cutting up tomatoes for the salad. She had developed a new respect for salad vegetables since she had read a report in the paper about a holy tomato being found in Huddersfield. The article was on the fridge under a St Sebastian magnet from a holy shrine in the Basque country.

  Pilgrims View Holy Tomato

  Huddersfield salad ingredient joins list of

  symbolic fruit and veg

  By Martin Wainwright

  The holy tomato of Huddersfield yesterday joined religion’s rich tradition of curious edible symbols, taking its place beside the Jesus tortilla and the aubergine of Allah.

  More than 200 people have so far travelled from London, Birmingham and Manchester to enjoy brief glimpses of the fruit wrapped in cling film in a terraced house fridge.

  The excitement centres on fibres and marks in the flesh which appear to spell out the Koranic messages: ‘There is no God but Allah’ and ‘Mohammed is the Messenger’.

  Although Arabic’s sinuous lines are well suited to the natural patterns of fruit and veg, the tomato is a particularly accurate template.

  ‘God must have made me buy it,’ said 14-year-old Shasta Aslam, who bought a 60p bag of tomatoes on her way home from school. She had been astonished to read the familiar texts as she sliced the fruit in half— the third of three tomatoes in a salad for her grandparents at their home in Lockwood, two miles from Huddersfield centre.

  The round red Moneymaker, which is admired in brief door-opening sessions to keep the fridge cool, follows an aubergine found with a similar message in Bolton, Lancashire. Linked mysteries include the celebrated milk drinking by Hindu statues in London last year and a series of tortillas showing Christ’s head in California.

  Mother cut up another potential symbol and examined the inside thoroughly.

  ‘Where did you get these?’ Eve asked.

  ‘Who ha, what not, Asda.’

  ‘I don’t think it’s likely, Mum.’

  Mother sighed and put the last cut but unhelpful, unholy tomato in the salad bowl.

  ‘No, you’re right. Maybe not from Asda.’

  ‘I mean at all.’

  It was the wrong thing to say. Mother turned and pointed at her child with the vegetable knife. ‘Don’t you be so sure. I know it mostly happens in foreign countries but if it can happen in Huddersfield then…’ Mother and daughter left unsaid the many possibilities of revelation that existed for fresh produce in the Home Counties.

  ‘You don’t take me seriously,’ muttered Mother, as she wrung water from a spring onion.

  Eve smiled. ‘Oh, I do, Mum. If anyone should find inspiration in a tomato it ought to be you. You deserve it.’

  Mrs Cameron eyed her daughter carefully. She was not, on the whole, in favour of the idea that anybody deserved anything. It was God’s will and it simply had to be borne.

  ‘You’re frowning again,’ said Mrs Cameron, and limped back to the sink. Eve and her frown sat down at the kitchen table. The surface was spread with travel brochures advertising the wonders of Lourdes and its many dramatic possibilities. Lourdes was Mrs Cameron’s new ambition. She had originally wanted to go to Heritage USA — the 21st Century Christian Campground of Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker in America. It had been rather a splendid offering, which included a Heavenly Fudge Shoppe, a Noah’s Ark Toy Shoppe and a Walk of Faith leading to an air-conditioned replica of the ‘top room’ where the Last Supper was held. Sadly the whole place had gone bankrupt after federal officials had had the effrontery to disagree with the amount of money God wanted the Bakkers to have in their private account. Eve leafed through the holy town’s offerings while her mother shook water off some radishes. Eve knew better than to offer to help. As a child she had been welcome, but now Eve was an adult and this kitchen was another woman’s territory.

  ‘Doesn’t it look exciting?’ Mrs Cameron said, bringing a cloth to wipe the table where Eve had leant on it. ‘My salsa class from St Francis’s is thinking of going. We hope we might be able to help Mrs who ha… Hartnell.’

  ‘I thought she only had one leg.’

  Mother nodded. ‘Exactly.’ Eve tried to imagine the monopod Mrs Hartnell taking one trip to Lourdes, having a miracle and salsaing home. Lobsters can regrow a claw if it falls off. What was God thinking when he gave that to them and not to us? Did that make lobsters more important in the scheme of things? Eve shut her eyes and tried to imagine Mrs Hartnell growing another leg and … A key in the front door accompanied by some Australian whine stopped the full picture emerging.

  ‘Oh, Willie, darling, for God’s sake, you could have parked much closer. I told you there would be a space.’

  Eve’s older brother William and his wife Pe Pe had arrived.

  ‘I don’t want anyone scratching the car, sweetheart. Do you know what the average cost of a simple scratch repair is, my pumpkin?’

  William was the family success. He had done very well. After Mr Cameron had retired, William had taken over the family firm and turned Cameron Builders into a huge enterprise. The company was involved in all manner of things now, some of which seemed to Eve to be nothing to do with building at all.

  ‘Taken over the whole of the underground sewage routing for the council,’ he had announced on the phone to her recently. ‘It’s very technical. All the latest computers.’ He was obviously pleased or he wouldn’t have phoned, but Eve couldn’t think of anything to say. The subject of sending toilet business away under the roads day after day seemed to her to have limited conversational appeal.

  To look at, William was something of an odd fellow. Even as a boy he had been given to wearing a tie on days off. He appeared now in blazer and flannels with his tie crushing his white shirt firmly shut around the neck. Eve thought perhaps the ever-present tie was to distract attention from his tragic hair. Why don’t men who are going bald just let i
t happen? The back wasn’t too bad, but he had wisps of fine hair at the front that seemed to cross his forehead as a bit of a dare.

  William was married to an Australian called Philippa, except the family were all supposed to call her Pe Pe. Apparently everyone called her Pe Pe as a child and she still thought this was a good idea. She insisted on calling him Willie. Pe Pe and Willie. Eve thought it sounded like a child’s introduction to potty training.

  Pe Pe was William’s third wife. He changed them at about the same rate as Eve and Adam did the car. This particular wife helped represent William’s move up in the world. Like him, she was very successful, but in a different field. Pe Pe wrote self-help books about being happy. The books sold all over the world and presumably that helped make them both happy. Before she had taken on the good humour of the globe, Pe Pe had been a champion swimmer. Miss Butterfly Stroke from the 1989 Melbourne Games or something. Certainly she had the arms for it. She had been in England for about ten years and Eve wouldn’t have been the least bit surprised to find she had swum over.

  William had his own key to Mother’s house ‘in case of emergencies’. He had a key to Eve’s house too and Shirley’s flat. Quite possibly he had keys to the entire neighbourhood to check their sewage routing.

  ‘Little Evie!’ he barked as he saw his sister emerge from the kitchen into the hall. He gave her a bear hug which enveloped Eve in the musky smell of too much aftershave. Pe Pe appeared in a sheath of a dress sprayed on as an homage to the wonders of vacuum sealing. Her perfectly sculpted body and perfectly sculpted hair shimmered into the house. A three-dimensional ad for vitamin supplements and the ability to put your toe behind your ear in yoga class. She beamed and smiled as if they all actually got on. Pe Pe smiled non-stop. She smiled at her father-in-law’s funeral, she smiled now for the will reading, she would no doubt die smiling.

  ‘Eve, how delightful. You look delightful.’ Eve thought for a minute she was going to punch her on the arm. She scowled and caught sight of herself in the hall mirror standing next to her Australian relative. Delightful. A goddess standing beside what looked like a Teletubbie with a hangover.