by Sue Townsend
34
At lunchtime on Boxing Day, Brian laid a big wooden tray on Eva’s lap. On it was the Beavers’ traditional Boxing Day meal.
He said, ‘It’s like fucking Groundhog Day down there. Same faces, only the food is different. They’re all Billy No Mates with nowhere else to go.
Brianne had invited Alexander and the children back, despite Brian’s disapproval, and Alexander had accepted because he wanted to spend as much time with Eva as possible before he went to visit his ex-mother-in-law.
Stanley was there at Ruby’s invitation. She said it made a change to have a gentleman in the house.
Only Poppy was missing. She had left early in the morning to ‘feed the poor’, she said, at a warehouse run by Crisis at Christmas in the city centre.
Brian said, ‘That kid has got a heart of gold.’ The twins had simultaneously put their fingers down their throats.
Eva said, ‘This salad looks lovely.’
‘My mother pillaged Sainsbury’s this morning,’ said Brian. ‘There was no flesh left on that turkey.’
Eva looked down at her plate, which was layered in cold meats. ‘It all looks very pretty.’
‘Your mother was fart-arsing about with it all morning,’ said Brian, contemptuously.
There was a small bowl of salad arranged in concentric alternating circles of tomato, cucumber, beetroot, large radish and bumper spring onions. In another bowl was a huge steaming baked potato, cut with a cross, revealing in the centre a quickly melting slab of butter. A small oval dish held a tiny peaked mountain of grated orange cheese. Two slices of pork pie were flanked by carrot sticks and crooked half-moons of green pepper. An egg cup was full of HP sauce. Her napkin had been folded into a fan. Eva was pleased to see a large glass of rosé wine.
Brian said, ‘Alexander’s boy is wearing a pink tutu, but nobody has mentioned it yet.’
‘Your mum told me that after you’d seen The Wizard of Oz you wanted a pair of Dorothy’s red shoes,’ said Eva.
Brian said, in a resentful tone, ‘But I didn’t get them, did I?’
When Brian went downstairs to join the others, Alexander asked him, ‘Eva all right?’
Brian said, ‘Why shouldn’t she be all right? She’s waited on hand and foot. If she’s not careful, she’ll lose the use of her limbs.’
Yvonne put a wafer-thin roll of ham in her mouth and said, ‘Now, I don’t agree with most of what you have to say, Brian, but I’m in full agreement with you about Eva. It’s sheer laziness. What would happen to her if we stopped feeding her? Would she starve to death, or would she come downstairs and feed herself?’
We ought to try it,’ said Ruby.
Alexander said, ‘Don’t try it for the next week, because I’m going away.’
Brianne was alarmed. Where are you going?’ Venus answered, We’re going to see my mummy’s mummy.’
Thomas said, ‘And we’re going to put some flowers at the place where our mummy’s under the ground.’
Yvonne turned to Alexander and said, ‘You’re not dragging these little children around graveyards, are you?’
Alexander said, unsmilingly, ‘No, only the one.’
Brian Junior was tweeting to the worldwide twitterati:
Worst xmas dinner evar. It was actually carbon, dudes. Now boxing day, bored — sitting with living dead, desire zombie apocalypse.
He said to the room, ‘At the moment, mine and Brianne’s priority is getting rid of Poppy.’
‘The child is ill,’ said Brian, in Poppy’s defence. ‘I spoke to her this morning. She offered to leave this afternoon, but I said she must stay until she feels able to cope on her own.’
Ruby said, ‘It took me years to get over my main’s death. I used to think about her hanging out the washing on a windy day. Let’s hope that poor little Poppy has a lovely memory of when her main and dad were fit and well.’
Venus said to Stanley, ‘Your face is getting better.’
‘I’m very pleased to hear that,’ said Stanley. Turning to the others, he asked, ‘On the subject of Poppy, did anybody else notice that she has a swastika tattoo underneath that gaudy ring she wears? I wonder if she realises the significance of such an emblem.’
Brian said, ‘Young people flirt with all kinds of shock imagery, it doesn’t make her Eva Braun. She’ll have a place in this house for as long as I’m living here.’
Stanley said, ‘You surprise me, Dr Beaver. Are you not offended by fascist symbols? I wouldn’t have marked you down as a Nazi sympathiser.’
‘A Nazi sympathiser!’ retorted Brian. ‘She’s eighteen years old, flirting with different philosophies.’
The doorbell rang. Thomas climbed down from his chair and went to answer it.
‘Ahh, bless his little heart,’ said Ruby, ‘he won’t be able to reach.’
Thomas stretched up and, with both hands, pulled down on the front-door handle.
Dr Titania Noble-Forester was surprised to see a small black boy wearing a pink tutu and ballet shoes.
Thomas said, ‘Have you been crying?’
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Yes, I have.’
‘I was crying in the car for ten minutes.’
‘Why?’
‘I had nothing else to do,’ said Thomas. ‘How long were you crying?’
‘All night, and an hour or two this morning.’ She added, ‘Is that bastard Dr Beaver at home?’
Thomas said, ‘Yes,’ and remained standing in front of the door.
‘I’d like to speak to him. Would you move away from the door, please?’
Titania could hear raised voices coming from the back of the house. One of them was Brian’s. He was shouting something about Norse mythology, pagan symbolism and Odinism.
‘Do you want to come in?’ asked Thomas.
‘Yes, please,’ said Titania.
Thomas led Titania into the kitchen.
Brian almost choked on the skin of his baked potato. Titania announced, ‘He’s thrown me out, Brian. I can’t go to my mother’s, it would kill her. And I can’t go to my sister’s. I wouldn’t give that bitch the satisfaction. You said you would leave Eva after Christmas. Well, it’s after Christmas now.’
There was a general gasp of surprise from everybody except Brian. He propelled his heavy bulk from his chair, as though he’d been shot from a cannon. He landed at Titania’s side, the floor joists groaning suddenly under his weight. He tried frantically to push her out of the kitchen, but she stood her ground.
Stanley Crossley, who had risen to his feet when Titania first came in, said, ‘Madam, you look distressed. May I offer you a drink?’
Brian roared, ‘It’s my bloody house! I’ll decide who drinks in it!’
Titania crossed her arms and planted her feet. She had not moved from the doorway. She said, ‘I would like a double vodka, diet tonic, a slice of lemon and half a handful of crushed ice, with a pink drinking straw, if you have one. Thank you.
Ruby enquired, ‘So, who’s she when she’s at home?’
Titania said, ‘Old lady, I have been Dr Brian Beaver’s lover for many years.’
‘Lover?’ said Ruby. Brian was one of the people, together with the Queen, who Ruby could not equate with any kind of sexuality.
Brian looked around his kitchen.
What had happened to his world? He seemed to strongly dislike all the people in it. There was a man with a burned face mixing a drink for Titania — a woman he used to desire. There was a little boy in a ballet tutu and a seven-year-old girl who appeared to practise her own school of Utilitarian philosophy, two old women who belonged in the Middle Ages (or the mid-1950s), his twins who were cleverer than he was and had ostentatiously turned their chairs and their backs to his lover, and an annoyingly well-educated black man with hair that fell almost to his waist. And, to put a tin lid on it, upstairs there was a wife who needed to think and was taking her time over it.
Was he the only normal Homo sapiens left? Did the ignorant public really expect to find
people like themselves living on a planet on the far side of the cosmos? It was highly unlikely that any of these aliens wrote notes to the milkman or paid pet insurance. Didn’t these ignoramuses understand that human beings were the real aliens?
He thought back to his childhood, when breakfast had been at 7.30 a.m., lunch at 12.45 p.m. and their evening meal at 6 p.m. on the dot. Bedtime was 7.15 p.m. until he was twelve, and 8 p.m. until he was thirteen, when it increased by half an hour. There were no computers to distract him then — though he had read about them in the comic Look and Learn. For a treat his mother had taken him to see Leicester’s first computer, which was housed in the offices of a hosiery factory and was twice as big as his bedroom. Yet again, he began to mourn the fact that he would be dead for certain in fifty years, and would not see the rise of nanotechnology, quantum computing or the subsequent planetary consciousness. With his high blood pressure he would be lucky to see the Mars landing.
Yvonne said sharply, ‘Brian!’
‘Yeah?’
‘You’re doing that thing again.’
What thing?’
‘That moaning thing you did when you were a boy, looking at the sky.’
Brian aggressively cleared his throat, as though there were some physical obstruction.
Ruby said, ‘I know I’m a bit old-fashioned, but is it only me who thinks this whole situation is disgraceful?’ She glared at Titania. ‘In my day, Brian, you’d have been beaten up by the woman’s husband. You would have been lucky to keep your kneecaps. You should be ashamed of yourself.’
Titania said, emphatically, ‘Brian has been unhappily married for years.’ Then, addressing him, she said, ‘I’m going upstairs to talk to your wife, Brian.’
Thomas asked, ‘Can I come?’
Titania gave one of her barking laughs and said, Why not, little boy? You are not too young to find out that your sex is inherently simple-minded and cruel.’
Alexander said, ‘Thomas, sit down.’
Taking her vodka with her, Titania stalked out of the kitchen and shouted, ‘Eva!’
‘Up here!’
Eva’s first thought on seeing Titania was that she looked like a funeral director, in her black skirt and white shirt. The skin around her eyes was so puffy that she had either developed a serious allergy, or the poor woman had been crying for a very long time.
Titania said, ‘He didn’t tell me you were beautiful. He told me you were a scrag-hag. Are you a natural blonde?’
‘Yes,’ said Eva. ‘Are you a natural redhead, Titania?’
Titania sat on the soup chair and began to cry, again. ‘He promised he would leave you after Christmas.’
‘Perhaps he will,’ said Eva. ‘Boxing Day is still Christmas. Perhaps he’ll leave me tomorrow’
‘My husband has thrown me out,’ said Titania. ‘I’ve got nowhere to go.’
Eva was rarely malicious — she had a heart as soft as her goose-down pillows — but she resented the eight years she had been lied to. ‘Come and live here,’ she said. ‘You can join Brian in his main shed. There’s plenty of wardrobe space. As we both know, Brian has no clothes to speak of.’
Titania said, ‘I don’t sense that this is an altruistic gesture.’
Eva admitted, ‘No, it’s not. He likes his solitude. He will hate having somebody else living full-time in his precious shed.’
The two women laughed, though not companionably. Titania said, ‘I’ll finish my drink, then I’ll get my stuff out of the car.’
Eva said, ‘Tell me something. Do you fake your orgasms?’
‘There usually isn’t time, he’s finished in a couple of minutes. I sort myself out.’
Eva said, ‘Poor Brian, in the football league of lovers, he’s Accrington Stanley.’
Why has nobody told him?’ said Titania.
‘It’s because we pity him,’ said Eva, ‘and we’re stronger than him.’
Titania confided, ‘When I was invited to CERN to work on the collider, he said, “Really? They must be in trouble.”‘
Eva said, ‘When I first showed him the embroidered chair that I’d worked on for two years, he said, “I could learn to embroider, if I put my mind to it. It’s only cloth, needle and thread, isn’t it?”‘
Titania ran her hands over the arms of the chair, and said, ‘It’s exquisite.’
When she’d gone, Eva knelt at the window and watched Titania struggle to bring in what looked like the contents of a small household.
35
In the kitchen, Titania and Brian started to row over his reluctance to carry her belongings down to the shed. The others drifted away from the kitchen table and sat on the stairs, not knowing where to go or what to do.
Eva heard their subdued voices echoing in the hallway, and invited them into her room.
Ruby lowered herself into the soup chair, Stanley perched on the end of the bed, using his walking stick as a support, and the others sat cross-legged on the floor, with their backs against the walls.
Alexander caught Eva’s gaze, and held it for a moment. Thomas and Venus began to play Cruel Russian Ballet Teacher, a game they had perfected over Christmas. When Venus ranted at Thomas that his arabesque was ‘rubbish’, and threatened to beat him with an imaginary stick, Alexander sent them downstairs to play.
Brian Junior’s mobile rang.
It was Ho.
Brian Junior said, ‘Yes?’ into the phone.
Where do I go to collect government money?’ asked Ho.
Brian Junior was momentarily confused. ‘I’m not with you. Explain.’
Ho said, ‘I have no money left for food. And I am hungry. I have phoned Poppy, but she does not answer. So, do you know the location of the government money office in Leeds?’
Brian Junior explained, ‘It won’t be open today. And they won’t give you any when they do open — you’re a full-time student.’
Ho asked again, ‘Where will I get money?’
Brian Junior said, ‘Ho, I can’t help you. I haven’t got room in my head for somebody else’s problems.’
‘If I go to one of your churches, and ask one of the priests for money, will they give me some?’
‘Probably not.’
‘But if I tell them I am very hungry, and have not eaten for two days and two nights?’
Brian Junior squirmed and said, ‘Please, this is making me feel ill.’
‘But I am like your Jesus in the desert. Sometimes he had no food.’
Brian Junior passed the phone to Brianne, who had been listening closely.
Brianne said angrily to Ho, ‘Now you’ve made three of us miserable.’
Ho said, ‘The phone is telling me that I have low credit power.’
Brianne said, ‘This is what you do. You put on your coat and your red scarf, and you go to the Sikh temple. It’s on the main road at the rear of our building There are orange flags flying outside. They will give you food. I know, because a boy in my seminar group blew his loan on a second-hand motorbike and a drum kit in the first week of term, and the Sikhs had to feed him for a month. Now, repeat back the instructions I have just given to you,’ she said, sternly. She listened for a moment, then said, ‘Right — coat, scarf, keys. Go now,’ and switched the phone off.
Alexander murmured, ‘Another Nazi in the house.’
Eva said, ‘Why is the poor boy in such a state?’
Brianne said, ‘He gave Poppy most of his money.
Stanley observed, ‘All roads lead to Poppy. What’s to be done with her?’
Brianne said, ‘I would happily see her walking away from our house, barefoot and dying in the snow.’
Eva held her head in her hands and said, ‘Brianne, please don’t talk like that. It makes you sound so callous.’
Brianne shouted, ‘You know nothing about her or the damage she’s caused! Why do you allow her to stay in our house? You know that me and Bri hate her guts!’
Ruby said, ‘Well, I for one feel sorry for the poor kid. Her main and
dad have just died! I had a long talk with her yesterday. They’re bringing the bodies back to Leicester, and I told her to use the Co-op funeral service. They did a lovely job for your granddad. It wasn’t their fault they went to the wrong house to pick the body up. Fair-tree Avenue does sound like Fir Tree Avenue.’
Brianne knelt at the side of the soup chair and said, very slowly and deliberately, looking into her grandmother’s face, ‘Gran, why would the Dundee authorities bring her parents’ bodies back to Leicester? When, according to Poppy, they lived in a house in Hampstead, surrounded by their rich relations and celebrity friends. Hugh Grant was her next-door neighbour.’
Ruby said, impatiently, ‘I know that! Poppy told me that they used to give him rides in their plane. He took over the controls once, when Poppy’s dad fell ill at the wheel. He had to make an emergency landing on Hampstead Heath. A policeman was slightly hurt.’
Brianne shouted, ‘You stupid old woman! Everything she’s told you has been a complete lie!’
Ruby’s face crumpled. ‘I’m surprised at you, Brianne. Talking to your elders in such a way. You used to be such a nice quiet girl. You’ve changed since you went to that university.’
Brianne leapt up. ‘There are no bodies coming back to the Co-op! Her parents are alive and living in Maidenhead! Her mother was on Facebook this morning, telling her “friends” that she’d had an electric blanket for Christmas!’
Eva said, ‘How can you possibly know that?’
Brianne and Brian Junior exchanged a look, and Brian Junior said, ‘We’re good with computers.’
Brianne put her arm around Brian Junior’s shoulder and said, ‘She isn’t Poppy Roberts. Her name is Paula Gibb. Her parents live in a council house. They don’t own a private plane. They don’t even have a car or central heating.’
Alexander said, ‘At least they’ve got an electric blanket.’ He looked around the group.
Nobody but Eva was laughing.
Stanley asked, ‘How long have you known?’
