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

Brian Junior got up, stretching his arms in an attempt to relax his rigid muscles, as if imploring Brianne to show him more respect. Heaving a deep sigh, he went into his bedroom.

When he returned with a large green box file, Brianne said, ‘Hand the papers round.’

‘What, like, at random?’

She nodded.

He dispersed the official-looking papers, some stapled, all printouts.

There was silence for a few moments, as people read the opening paragraphs of the documents they had been handed.

Ruby said, ‘Well, I’ve read this first bit of mine twice and I still don’t understand it.’

Yvonne asked, ‘Are we to be tested by the Big Brains?’

Brianne said, ‘You’ve got the birth certificate, Yvonne. Read it to us.’

‘Stop talking to me as if I’m a dog, a mongrel dog. When I was a girl -’

Brianne interrupted, ‘Yeah, when you were a girl, you were writing on a slate with a piece of chalk.’

Eva ordered her daughter, ‘Apologise to Granny.’

Brianne muttered ungraciously, ‘Soz.’

‘Well, it says here, this is the birth certificate of a child called Paula Gibb, born on the 31st of July 1993, her dad was Dean Arthur Gibb, car park attendant, and her mum was Claire Theresa Maria Gibb, bowling alley assistant.’

Brian Junior laughed out loud and said in a bad American accent, ‘Fuck it, dude, let’s go bowling.’

His family had never heard Brian Junior swear before. Eva was pleased at this proof that Brian Junior could be a normal foul-mouthed teenager.

Brianne turned to her brother. ‘Bri, no Lebowski, please. This is serious business.’

Alexander said, ‘I’ve got a social worker’s report here. When she was three and a half, Paula was temporarily taken into care and fostered.’

A stillness settled over the room.

Eva looked up from her printouts. ‘I’ve got an admission report for University Hospital, on the 11th of June 1995, and a six-month review written by her social worker, Delfina Ladzinski.’ Eva scanned the papers. Where do I start?’ She cleared her throat and read out what she thought were the most important details, as though she were reading the shipping forecast.

‘Medical assessment on being taken into care: cigarette burns on the backs of her hands and forearms, head lice, infected fleabites, impetigo. She was malnourished, unable to speak. Afraid to use the toilet. It’s hardly Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm, is it?’

Yvonne got up. ‘Well, I don’t know about anyone else, but I’ve had enough of this. It’s Boxing Day. I want some turkey sandwiches and a game of Mr Potato Head, not all this wallowing in the gutter.’

Ruby said, ‘Sit down, Yvonne! There are some things that have to be faced full on. I’ve got a report here from Thames Valley Police, about an arson attack on a children’s home in Reading. Paula Gibb was questioned but said she’d only been trying to light a cigarette using a Zip firelighter. She’d panicked and thrown the firelighter into the Activities Room, where it landed in the middle of the pool table -’

Yvonne interrupted. ‘All this is making me poorly.’

Eva said, ‘It explains everything.’

Stanley insisted, ‘But none of that excuses her current behaviour.’

Alexander nodded. ‘My mum used to leave me locked in my room in the dark. I don’t know where she went. She ordered me to keep clear of the window and told me that if I cried she would send me away, so I did as I was told. But The done OK.’

He looked up to find Eva gazing back at him with a fierce look in her eyes, as if she were seeing him for the first time.

Yvonne said, miserably, ‘If I’d known there was a deranged person staying here – well, another deranged person – I would never have come.’

Eva countered, ‘I’m not deranged, Yvonne. Can I remind you that your son, my husband, is downstairs arguing with his mistress?’

Yvonne looked down and straightened the rings on her arthritic fingers.

Brian Junior said, ‘I’ve got her GCSE and A level certificates here. She got twelve GCSEs, nothing below a C grade, but only two A levels – an A in English, and an A* in Religious Studies.’

‘So, she’s not just a psychopath,’ Alexander said, ‘she’s quite a clever psychopath. Now that is frightening.’

They all jumped and stared at the bedroom door as they heard the front door slam, followed by the familiar clump of Poppy’s boots in the hall.

Eva said, ‘I want to talk to her. Brian Junior, will you ask her to come up here, please?’

‘Why me, why do I have to go? I don’t want to speak to her. I don’t want to look at her. I don’t want to breathe the same air as her.’

Everybody looked at everybody else, but nobody moved.

Alexander said, ‘I’ll go.’

He went downstairs and eventually found her pretending to be asleep on the sofa in the sitting room, covered in a red blanket. She didn’t open her eyes, but Alexander could see by the flickering of her eyelids that she wasn’t really asleep.

He said, loudly, ‘Eva wants to see you,’ then watched her impersonating someone waking up. He felt a mixture of pity and contempt for her.

Poppy/Paula exclaimed, ‘I must have fallen asleep! It was an exhausting morning. Everybody at the shelter wanted a little bit of Poppy time.’

Alexander said, ‘Well, now Eva wants a little bit of Poppy time.’

When they walked into Eva’s bedroom, Poppy was met by a room full of accusatory faces. But she’d been in similar situations many times before. ‘Style it out, girl,’ she said to herself.

Eva patted the side of the bed and said, ‘Sit here, Paula. You don’t have to lie any more. We know who you are. We know your parents are alive.’ She held up a piece of paper. ‘It says here that your mother went to the Department of Work and Pensions on the 22nd of December, and asked for a crisis loan, claiming that she had no money for Christmas. Your mother is Claire Theresa Maria Gibb, isn’t she? Incidentally, are you Poppy or Paula?’

‘Poppy,’ the girl said, with a crooked nervous smile. ‘Please, don’t call me Paula. Please. Don’t call me Paula. I gave myself a new name. Don’t call me Paula.’

Eva took her hand and said, ‘OK. You’re Poppy. Why don’t you try to be yourself?’

Poppy’s first instinct was to pretend to cry, and sob, ‘But I don’t know who I am!’ Then she became curious: who was she? She would try to drop the little-girl voice, she thought. When she looked at the fraying 1950s evening dress she was wearing, it suddenly didn’t seem as charmingly eccentric as vintage clothes did on Helena Bonham Carter. And her big boots, with the carefully loosened laces, no longer gave her ‘character’. She shifted the gears in her brain into neutral and waited a few seconds to see where this would take her. She said, testing her new voice, ‘Can I stay until uni starts, please?’

Brianne and Brian Junior said, in unison, ‘No!’

Eva said, ‘Yes, you can stay until term starts. But these are the house rules. One, no more lies.’

Poppy repeated, ‘No more lies.’

‘Two, no more lounging on the sofa in your underwear. And three, no more stealing.’

Brianne said, ‘I found our egg timer in her bag last night.’

Poppy sat down next to Alexander, who said, ‘You’ve been given a great chance. Don’t fuck it up.’

Brianne said, ‘So, that’s it, is it? She’s forgiven, is she?’

‘Yes,’ said Eva. ‘Just like I’ve forgiven Dad.’

Stanley raised his hand and asked, ‘May I say something?’ He looked at Poppy. ‘I’m not a very forgiving person, and I cannot tell you how angry and distressed I am about your swastika tattoo. It has been preying on my mind. I know you are young, but you must have studied modern history and be fully aware that the swastika symbolises a great evil. And please don’t tell me that your fascist tattoo represents a Hindu god, or some such nonsense. You and I know that you chose a swastika either because you’re a Nazi, or because you wanted to boast about your alienation from our mostly decent society in order to shock. You could have chosen a snake, a flower, a bluebird, but you chose the swastika. I have in my house a collection of videos which chart the progress of the Second World War. One of those videos shows the liberation of Belsen, the concentration camp. Have you heard of Belsen?’