Sue Townsend - The Woman who Went to Bed for a Year

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?’