The Woman Who Went to Bed for a Year

by Sue Townsend

  Eva said, ‘I’m sure she’s alive.’

  ‘You’re sure?’

  Jade grabbed at this morsel of optimism as though Eva were the supreme keeper of all knowledge. ‘They said on the internet that you’ve got special powers. Some people said that you’re a witch and you do black magic.’

  Eva smiled. ‘I haven’t even got a cat.’

  ‘I believe that you’re a good person. If we both sit quietly and concentrate, do you think you could find out where she is? Can you see her?’

  Eva tried to backtrack, saying, ‘No, I haven’t got extrasensory perception. I’m not a criminologist. I’m not qualified to give an opinion, and I don’t know where Amber is. I’m sorry.’

  ‘Then why did you say you’re sure she’s alive?’

  Eva was disgusted with herself, what she had wanted to say was, ‘Most runaways are found alive.’

  ‘No, I think you’re right,’ said Amber’s mother. ‘I’d know if she was dead.’

  Eva said, ‘A lot of teenage girls run away to London.’

  ‘She’s been once before. We saw Les Misérables. She said she’d be on the side of the aristocrats. I couldn’t get her into Poundstretcher.’ She was shaking her head. ‘What do I do next?’

  ‘Have a shower, wash your hair, clean your teeth.’

  When Jade emerged from the bathroom, Eva could tell that she was better equipped to face the misery that had threatened to engulf her.

  Eva asked, ‘Where are you going now?’

  ‘I’ve got a cash card, I’ve got petrol. I’ll drive to London and look for her.’

  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.

  When he approached Ruby, she said that the pounds she had in her anorak pockets were donations to the Brown Bird & Beaver Charity. PC Hawk asked if this charity was registered with the Charity Commission, and was told that the registration was ‘in the post’.

  He then moved to the crowd of what he thought of as ‘weirdos’, warning them that if they didn’t stop singing, ululating, tinkling bells and chanting ‘Eva! Eva! Eva!’ he would charge them all with a breach of the peace.

  An anarchist in an army greatcoat, camouflage trousers and a black polo-neck sweater had spent an hour writing ‘HELP THE POLICE — BEAT YOURSELF Up’ on his forehead. He shouted feebly, ‘We’re living in a Police State.’

  PC Hawk’s hand twitched towards his Taser, but he was reassured when a bulky woman in a Noddy hat said, ‘England is the best country in the world, and our police are absolutely terrific!’

  The anarchist gave a harsh laugh.

  PC Hawk said, ‘Thank you, madam, it’s nice to be appreciated.’

  He thought the whole set-up was a disgrace. There were Asian people everywhere he looked, some on their knees praying, some sitting on a blanket having what looked like breakfast, and a large gang of elderly Muslim, Christian and Hindu women had gathered under Eva’s window, clapping and singing. There were no crowd barriers, no surveillance team, nobody directing the traffic. He rang for reinforcements, then walked over to the two old women standing in the doorway of number 15.

  He demanded of Yvonne that he be taken to see the householder.

  Yvonne said, ‘My son, Dr Brian Beaver, is at work, saving the world from attack by meteorites. You’d better talk to Eva herself. She’s upstairs, second on the left.’

  PC Hawk could not help but be a little thrilled that he was about to meet the Eva woman who’d been on the front of the paper, and all over the internet, and who he’d seen on the television news refusing to talk to good old Derek Plimsoll. This pr
oved to him that she had something to hide.

  Who wouldn’t want to be on television?

  It was his ambition to be the police spokesman for a murder enquiry. He knew all the phrases and sometimes practised them inside his head when he was driving around, bored, on his way to caution a youth for riding a moped without lights.

  He saw Eva before she saw him. He was startled by her beauty — she was supposed to be an old woman of fifty, wasn’t she?

  Eva was shocked to see a gangly baby-faced boy in a police uniform. She said, ‘Hello, have you come to arrest me?’

  He took out his notebook and said, ‘Not at this stage, madam, but I’d like to ask you a few questions. For how long have you been in bed?

  Eva tried to do the maths inside her head, then said, ‘Since the nineteenth of September.’

  The constable blinked a few times and said, ‘Nearly five months?’

  She shrugged her shoulders.

  ‘And are you separated from your husband?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Are you planning to leave your husband in the near future?’ he asked, emboldened by her frank response.

  Eva had watched her fair share of police dramas on television, and thought she knew about police procedures. But as the interview progressed, she began to realise that PC Hawk’s questions were entirely centred on herself— and her willingness to be courted by a young policeman.

  Their final exchange was particularly ludicrous. ‘What is your attitude towards the police?’

  ‘I think they’re a necessary evil.’ Would you ever consider dating a police officer?’

  ‘No, I don’t get out of bed.’

  She was relieved when the blushing boy finally said, ‘One last question. Why won’t you get out bed?’

  Eva answered, honestly, ‘I don’t know.’

  When PC Hawk returned to the station, he asked his superior officer if he could act as a family liaison officer for The Woman in Bed.