Flying Under Bridges

by Sandi Toksvig

  ‘Did you know that supermarkets put longer floor tiles in front of expensive items so that shoppers will feel more relaxed and so are more likely to buy things?’

  No one heard Eve speak. It was all nonsense. Not about the floor tiles. That was true. About the launderette. No one spoke. It is the ‘age of proximity without communication’. Eve had read that. No one spoke. No one was going to. There was just deaf old Mrs Ede, the woman reading. She, Eve and someone else’s feet on the end of Eve’s legs. And it was the feet that made Eve get up and leave. She couldn’t walk very fast in her heels but she tottered away from the launderette, she wobbled away from her spin cycle, she teetered away from Patsy Cline and straight into the nearest shoe shop on the High Street. Using her rarely touched credit card, Eve bought a very expensive pair of trainers and instructed the sales assistant, who had a ring through her nose, that she could, ‘Chuck those heels in the bin.’

  Newly shod, Eve stepped out into the cobbled street. Her feet felt totally different, her legs felt different. She felt bizarrely liberated and began to run. She ran and ran and ran, straight into Inge Holbrook.

  Inge and Eve had been inseparable at school and it should have been a great reunion but Eve didn’t see Inge at first because she was hidden behind a huge bundle of sheets. It was only when the two of them banged into each other and the sheets went flying that Eve realised who it was. Inge Holbrook. She looked just the same as she had at school. Blonde and athletic, attractive even in an old sweatshirt and jeans. Eve had a sudden flash of her getting out of bed at school and looking stunning even in the terrible pyjamas they had made everyone wear. It made her smile.

  ‘Inge?’ There was a slight stir in the street as Eve spoke. Many of the shoppers had seen Inge walking but so far the consensus had been to stare slightly without making actual contact. The woman straightening the rack outside What She Wants tensed and the man on the hot-potato stand cocked his ear to see if he had heard something. Inge turned and looked at her assailant. Recognition took a moment so Eve helped her.

  ‘Eve… Eve… Marsh… Cameron. Five X. Remember? Five X? I sat at the back with Susan Belcher. How we all laughed when we found out her family lived in a house called Windy Corner. The Belchers of Windy Corner.’ Inge was still frowning and Eve felt a bit embarrassed. Quite a few people were looking now. ‘Yes, well, we were easily pleased in those days.’ Inge looked at Eve again and then put her head back and laughed.

  ‘Good God, Camie, how unbelievable.’ Camie! Eve was thrilled. She hadn’t been Camie for thirty years. Cameron.

  Camie knickers… camie. Everyone called her Camie at school. Of course, after she left school she had thought Eve was more sophisticated. Now she realised it just sounded old. Eve and Inge smiled at each other. Huge, great, wide, genuine smiles. Eve tried to think where to go next. There were so many years to cross.

  ‘Lot of sheets you’ve got,’ she said. Inge nodded.

  ‘My friend’s not well.’

  Eve nodded sympathetically. ‘And my mother. My mother, she’s not well.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’ There was a pause.

  ‘I’m sorry about your… friend.’

  ‘Yes.’

  The two women, one famous and one not, were by now causing a slight stir. Inge whispered to her old chum, ‘You have to help me, Eve. I can’t remember where the launderette is and I don’t think the public can quite believe I have sheets.’

  After setting the laundry off they headed to the Right Bite Café and had a coffee. It was unbelievable. Not only was Inge back in Edenford but in her old house, right next to Adam and Eve. They were neighbours and it was wonderful for both of them. Eve, who had longed to talk, at last found someone who was willing, and Inge, who was afraid to talk, at last found someone she felt safe with.

  ‘I remember you that first day,’ Eve said, ‘wearing your boater like Maurice Chevalier instead of some suet pudding like the rest of us. Straight away, Miss Campden sat you at the front to keep an eye on you. Then I got moved to the front too. What with my eyes and everything. That’s how we sat next to each other. Poor Miss Campden. How she loved to read out Rupert Brooke. Do you remember? “The cool kindliness of sheets …”‘ Inge joined in and they laughed as they repeated together,

  ‘… that soon

  Smooth away trouble; and the rough male kiss

  Of blankets.’

  Inge winked at Eve. ‘I think Miss Campden had a bit of a run-in with a Yank during the war.’

  ‘Oh, Inge!’

  ‘I do. Finished up with a pair of stockings and that faraway look in her eye.’ Eve laughed Out loud. It felt so good. Inge smiled at her.

  ‘So, are you married?’ Eve asked, and then wondered why she had. Who cared if there was someone else. She didn’t care about there being someone else.

  ‘No. No, I’m not. I’m busy. Too busy.’

  Eve nodded and moved on. ‘By the way, I heard Miss Robertson died. You remember — biology, wore a tweed skirt all through that heat wave. It was Miss Robertson who-told us babies came from sex. I thought at the time that it all seemed most unlikely and probably quite uncomfortable and I can’t say I’ve changed my mind much. I was ages getting the facts straight.’

  Inge grinned. ‘Miss Robertson had so many hairs on her thin I used to find it difficult to concentrate.’

  Eve put her hand over her own chin and nodded. ‘It was that same summer we discovered about riding our bicycles over the cobblestones down Larchfield Lane. Do you remember? Sent tingles right through you.’

  ‘Do I remember? Susan Belcher couldn’t get enough of it. I can still see her — all plump legs and navy knickers, bumping down across the cobbles, especially the uneven ones, gripping her saddle with her thighs till she hit the kerb at the end and gave a great squeal as she collapsed on the handle bars. I think about that sometimes.’

  Eve had forgotten. She had forgotten so much of what Inge talked about that afternoon. They had more coffee, went to dry their wash and then came back for cake. It was wonderful. Inge’s face was so beautiful. Not a mark on it.

  ‘And do you remember Miss Robertson making us cover up all the windows with masking tape and back copies of Science for Schools magazine before the sex education lessons? She didn’t want the fourth form to see, but it made it rather dark so to be honest I couldn’t see too well either, and it certainly wasn’t something you did with the lights on. I remember a lot of hazy film with amoebas and tadpoles and Miss Robertson sweating profusely. The rest is a blur. Later we untaped the windows and dissected a chicken, which Miss Robertson was taking home for supper.’

  ‘Where did you go for the sixth form?’

  Inge shook her head at the memory. ‘St Ansten’s — my parents were so worried about my hormones that they confined me to an all-girls boarding school. The whole subject of sex was taboo. I spent two years at St Ansten’s working out why we weren’t allowed long-handled hairbrushes in the dorm and why no girl was allowed unaccompanied into the hockey equipment room.

  A woman at the next table had been pretending not to listen. She got up to go and as she passed by Eve and Inge’s table she stopped.

  ‘Oh God, it is, isn’t it? Don’t tell me but it is.’

  Inge stopped speaking. For a brief while she had forgotten to be careful. She leant across the table to Eve. ‘Eve, I think you’ve been recognised.’

  The woman laughed as if Inge had said the funniest thing in the world. ‘Inge Holbrook! I know I shouldn’t but I’m going to. May I?’ The woman pushed her bottom on to the bench seat next to Eve so that Eve had to move along. The woman’s whole attention was on Inge. It was as if Eve wasn’t even there. ‘My name is Paula, Paula Ross, and I run the campaign for bereaved people with special needs — I’m sure you’ve heard of it. Anyway, we are holding our first annual ball in the autumn and I just know you would be the perfect speaker. We had asked that newsreader but you know she’s had such trouble with…’ The woman mimed the words ‘breast cancer’ and mo
ved on. ‘You don’t have to decide now, naturally, but I can’t tell you how marvellous it would be. Here’s my name and address…’ The woman scribbled on a napkin. ‘Do call any time. Now, where can I get hold of you?’

  Inge dutifully wrote out her agent’s address and handed it over. The woman looked positively tearful. ‘Marvellous, it’s going to be marvellous.’ And then she was gone.

  Inge waited till the door of the café had closed behind the intruder and then both she and Eve started to giggle.

  ‘Oh God,’ sniggered Inge. ‘Do you think she heard us talking about sex?’

  Eve looked at her old friend. Inge said it all so naturally. Eve couldn’t believe she was sitting in the Right Bite Café in Edenford High Street talking about sex. She wasn’t sure she had ever talked about sex with anyone. Mother had never really explained it, except to say that sex was something two people did only when they were very much in love. This seemed strange to Eve as a child. Everyone knew that Harry Minter and his wife, Marie, who lived across the road, did it all the time and he was horrible to her. At parties he would sit with his hand round the back of her neck and squeeze it every time she said something he didn’t like or if she wanted another drink. Then they would go home and you could hear them going at it hammer and tongs in the sandpit in their back garden that they’d bought for their kids.

  Eve couldn’t stop smiling at Inge and then Inge asked Eve what she did and she had to say, ‘Housewife,’ and it sounded so awful. She said so. ‘It’s awful, isn’t it?’

  ‘And then what?’ Inge replied.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘What will you do next?’ Inge leant across the table towards Eve. ‘I’m going to learn to fly. One of those little planes you can take up on your own. Kate and I want to go to California. I shall learn to fly and… you know the Golden Gate Bridge?’

  Eve nodded. She knew what it looked like. She’d never been but she’d seen pictures. ‘You want to fly over that? How wonderful.’

  ‘Over it!’ exclaimed Inge, so that the other table stopped their conversation about the problems inherent with flat roofs and listened. ‘Anybody can fly over it. I want to go underneath.’ Inge left Eve with that thought and swooped back to the past. ‘Do you know, at school Matron used to come in and wake us in the morning and we had to get out of bed instantly the door opened? I heard she died a few years ago and I couldn’t have been more delighted. Isn’t that dreadful? Kate’s a Quaker and…’

  Eve wasn’t really listening. Eve was thinking about her life, about her house. I could be a cabbage in that house, she said to herself. Eve, you could do something with your life. You don’t have to just sit here like a pudding. Eve’s Pudding. It was like a light had gone on in her derelict building. It changed everything. In fact the whole avocado business would never have happened if Inge hadn’t turned up.

  Chapter Ten

  14 January

  Holloway Prison for Women

  London

  My dear Inge,

  Being No One

  seeing in the distance a fig tree in leaf, Jesus went to see if he could find anything on it. When he came to it, he found nothing but leaves, for it was not the season for figs. And he said? to it,

  ‘May no one ever eat fruit from you again.’

  (MARK 11.13)

  I don’t understand that story. It wasn’t the season for figs. The tree could hardly be blamed, yet it got cursed to never make anything good again. What’s it about? It just seems like temper but that can’t be it. If anyone came along to my tree there’d be no fruit. That’s what I am. I’m the cursed fig tree.

  You know that I don’t blame you for anything that happened, don’t you? Something in your last letter didn’t feel right. I mean, it’s important that you know none of this was your fault. You’re my friend. You’re the person I trust to look after my daughter now that things are so bad. I don’t blame you but everything changed after you came. That day, after we met, you went home with your laundry and I should have done the same, but I felt so shaky I didn’t know what to do with myself. I saw myself sitting, spending my life sitting. I have spent my adulthood waiting for others to do what they had to do. Sitting at the table waiting for Adam to come home for his dinner, sitting in the school playground waiting for the bell to ring and sitting waiting for my children. Waiting. Sitting. I didn’t mind so much for Shirley. She was going to be a dancer. Did you know that? Jazz, ballet, tap, we did it all, well, she did. I watched. I loved it. All the girls running around, needing help to put their hair in buns, sewing costumes. The big shows at the end of the year. Waiting in the wings. Watching my angel floating out in front of everyone.

  ‘Your daughter’s got real talent,’ people would say. ‘You must be so proud.’

  And I was. I waited and I was. I used to dream about seeing her in the West End or some film, you know, like Leslie Caron without the accent. I hadn’t done anything but she was going to. She was going to.

  After we chatted, you and I, I couldn’t sit for another minute. I knew I’d had too much coffee so I went along to the library. I don’t know what I was looking for. A book to change things somehow.

  I was dithering in the careers section when I met Theresa Baker. We’d never really had a conversation even though she lives only a few doors up. Anyway, she was looking up something in tile grouting and we rather bumped into each other. Theresa’s really quite the riskiest thing in our close. She’s not married to her partner. That’s not the risky bit. No. She had a ‘placenta party’ after her last home-birth. Apparently in the old days women used to fry up the whole thing and eat it. Packed with protein. The whole street was invited. It was twins so I expect there was plenty to go round but we didn’t go. I didn’t go because, well, I was busy and Adam didn’t go because I didn’t tell him about it.

  Anyway, she said, ‘Hello, Eve, getting the latest Joanna Trollope?’

  ‘No. No,’ I said, even though it was always a possibility. ‘No. I need a book on starting your own business.’ The librarian heard me and immediately went looking. Theresa frowned at me but my mouth kept moving on its own. ‘I’m starting my own business. Doing organising for people. You know, people who are too busy to work and run their homes efficiently. A wardrobe and cupboard organiser. I’m very good at kitchen cupboards.’

  ‘Gosh.’ Theresa chuckled. ‘What an extraordinary idea. Actually I could do with that. Let me know what you charge.’

  Charge? Charge? Money? ‘Yes, yes I will.’

  ‘By the way,’ she said, ‘you going to your sister’s classes?’

  ‘Classes?’ I said, trying not to sound as if I didn’t know what Theresa was talking about.

  ‘Women’s Studies, at your mum’s house.’

  Fact —25 per cent of all housewives are clinically depressed.

  I’ll get to the women’s classes in a minute because they’re important, but first I have to say that I don’t believe that statistic about housewives for a moment. That means seventy-five per cent feel fine. I read in the paper today that a new study has shown that women who are depressed ought to spring clean the house. Everyone in prison is madly looking for my depression. In here we are all either mad or bad and at the moment I haven’t been categorised, which makes things uncomfortable for the authorities. It would be good to blame my behaviour on the menopause except for two things: apparently no scientific association has ever been clinically demonstrated between depression and women’s hormone levels. And (I think this one is the clincher) I hadn’t had the menopause yet.

  I can’t say I had depression as such but they give disturbed animals in the zoo Prozac. Germaine says — this suggests misery in response to unbearable circumstances rather than something constitutional. The trouble is my circumstances were not unbearable, just predictable. I hadn’t done anything with my life and by the time I realised, it felt like it was too late. I’ve been crying and the shrink says that’s okay. It’s what we women do — seek relief in tears. Men do it wit
h masturbation he told me, which was more information than I needed.

  I cried when Diana died, Princess Diana, and I didn’t know her but I knew that feeling. That sitting on your own feeling she must have had and she was beautiful. The whole town got together and erected a plaque at Anderson’s Garage. She once stopped for fruit gums on her way to a polo match. I don’t think she actually bought them herself but that wasn’t the point. The mayor unveiled the plaque and Mr Anderson played memorial music over the tannoy system, which is usually used to warn people that they are inadvertently about to fill up with diesel.

  I am allowed to be sad. Sad is fine. It’s the crazy bit that they’re all on the look-out for. It was crazy what I did, killing someone, but I wouldn’t do it again. Then I keep thinking about what will happen if they do let me go. Will I just go back and sit in my kitchen? Look out of the window and pluck hairs from my chin? The psychiatrist has shown me that I need to change my world. Martha showed me that, come to think of it, but I don’t know how. All I knew was that I could change Shirley’s world. That I could change things for my daughter so that she didn’t end up just sitting. I don’t know what will happen to her now but I know she isn’t married to that man. To that man who would have made her sit and wait all her life. That’s what I need her to understand.

  ‘Do you think you were a good mother?’ they keep asking, and I don’t know. I thought so. I mean, it was what I did, but Adam blamed me for Tom. He so wanted a son to follow him into business. To build on his insurance empire. To see that nothing ever happened to anybody for which they did not receive some financial reward. When Tom went his own way, Adam said it was my fault for encouraging him. They blame the mother for everything. Not the father. I read that some people in Finland had done a study and they found that being unwanted by your mother was the crucial factor in the subsequent development of schizophrenia. It’s such a responsibility. Right from the beginning they tell you that a glass of wine can cause neurological problems in the foetus. That you need to provide the ‘optimum uterine environment’ or your kid will be clueless, but not to worry too much about it because stress is bad for the baby.