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

She would have to act quickly, before she lost her nerve.

She would bring up how he undermined her in public.’ the way he introduced her to his friends by saying, ‘And this is the Klingon.’ How he had bought her twenty-five pounds’ worth of lottery tickets for her last birthday.

But then she thought about how quickly his bombast deflated, and how sad he had looked when she had asked him to sleep somewhere else. She stood near the bedroom door for a few moments, thinking through the consequences, then climbed back into bed, withdrawing from the potential battle.

She was startled awake at 3.1 5 a.m. by Brian screaming and fighting the duvet. His bedside light snapped on. When her eyes focused on her surroundings, she saw Brian stamping his foot on the carpet and holding his right calf.

‘Cramp?’ she said.

‘Not cramp! Your fucking high heels! You’ve kicked a hole in my bloody leg!’

‘You should have stayed in Brian Junior’s room and not come sneaking back into mine.’

Brian said, ‘Your room? It used to be ours.’

Brian was not good with pain or blood and here he was in the early hours of the morning, with both. He began to wail. When Eva had orientated herself.’ she could see that there actually was a hole in his leg.

‘A lot of blood… wash the wound clean,’ he said. ‘You’ll have to bathe it with distilled water and iodine.’

Eva could not leave the bed. Instead, she reached over and plucked the bottle of Chanel No. 5 off her bedside table. She pointed the nozzle at Brian’s wound and pressed, keeping her finger on the spray mechanism. Brian squealed, hopped across the beige carpet and out of the door.

She had done the right thing, Eva thought, as she drifted back off to sleep. Everybody knows that Chanel No. 5 is a good antiseptic in an emergency.

At about five thirty Eva was woken again.

Brian was limping around the bedroom.’ yelling, ‘The pain! The pain!’ at regular intervals. When Eva sat up, Brian said, ‘I phoned NHS Direct. They employ morons! Idiots! Plonkers! Fools! Halfwits! Dingbats! Cretins! Hamburger flippers! Pond life! An African witch doctor would have been better informed!’

Eva said wearily, ‘Brian, please. Don’t you get tired of fighting the world?’

‘No, I don’t much like the world.’

Eva felt a terrible pity for her husband as he stood at the end of the bed, naked, with a white linen napkin tied around one leg and with toast crumbs in his beard. Eva turned away from him.

He was an intrusion in what was now her bedroom.

Brianne wondered how long Poppy would be crying. She could hear her sobbing through the party wall.

She looked at the alarm clock she had owned since she was a child. Barbie was pointing to the four and Ken was indicating the one. It wasn’t what she had expected from her first night at university.

She thought, ‘I’ve been dragged into the pages of an EastEnders script by that awful girl.’

At about half past five she was startled awake from a ragged sleep by somebody banging on her door. She could hear Poppy whimpering She froze. There was no escape from her on the sixth floor of the accommodation block – and anyway, the window only opened a few inches.

‘It’s me – Poppy. Let me in?’

Brianne shouted, ‘No! Go to sleep, Poppy!’

Poppy beseeched, ‘Brianne, help me! I’ve been attacked by a man with one eye!’

Brianne opened her door and Poppy fell into the room. ‘I’ve been attacked!’

Brianne took a look up and down the corridor. It was empty. The door to Poppy’s room was open and the emo track that she played incessantly – A Fine Frenzy’s ‘Almost Lover’ – was blaring out. She glanced into Poppy’s room. There was no sign of a violent struggle. The bedcover was unwrinkled.

When she returned to her own room, she was disconcerted to find that Poppy was wearing her favourite fluffy acrylic dressing gown, had climbed under her duvet and was sobbing into her pillow Brianne didn’t know what to do, so she put the kettle on and asked, ‘Shall I phone the police?’

‘Don’t you think I’ve been defiled enough?’ shouted Poppy. ‘I’ll just sleep in your bed tonight, with you.’

Thirty minutes later, Brianne was clinging on to the edge of the bed. She vowed to go to the university library tomorrow and source a book on how to grow a backbone.

On the second day Eva woke and threw the duvet back and sat on the side of the bed.

Then she remembered that she didn’t have to get up and make breakfast for anyone, yell at anyone else to get up, empty the dishwasher or fill the washing machine, iron a pile of laundry, drag a vacuum cleaner up the stairs or sort cupboards and drawers.’ clean the oven or wipe various surfaces, including the necks of the brown and the red sauce bottles, polish the wooden furniture, clean the windows or mop the floors, straighten rugs and cushions, shove a brush down various shitty toilets or pick up soiled clothing and place it in a laundry basket, replace light bulbs and toilet rolls, pick up things from downstairs that were upstairs and bring them down or pick up things from upstairs that were downstairs, fetch dry-cleaning, weed the borders, visit garden centres to buy bulbs and annuals, polish shoes or take them to the key cutter, return library books, sort recycling, pay paper bills, visit one mother and worry about not visiting one mother-in-law, feed the fish and clean out the filter, answer the phone for two teenagers and pass on messages, shave legs or pluck eyebrows, give self-manicure, change the sheets and pillow cases on three beds (if it was Saturday), hand wash woollen jumpers and dry flat on a bath towel, pay bills, shop for food she wouldn’t eat herself, wheel it to the car, unload it into the boot, drive home, put the food away in the fridge and the cupboards and, on tiptoe, place tins and dried goods on a shelf that exceeded her reach but was perfectly comfortable for Brian.

She would not be chopping vegetables and browning meat for a casserole. She would not be baking bread and cakes because Brian preferred the home-made to the shop bought. She would not be cutting grass.’ weeding.’ planting and sweeping paths or collecting leaves in the garden. She would not be painting the new fence with creosote. She would not be chopping wood to light the real log fire that Brian sat next to after he came home from work in the winter months. She would not be brushing her hair, showering or hurriedly applying make-up.

Today she would not be doing any of those things.

She would not be worrying that her clothes were uncoordinated, because she could not see the time when she would be wearing clothes again. She would only be wearing pyjamas and a dressing gown for the foreseeable future.

She would rely on other people to feed her, wash her and buy her food. She didn’t know who these people were but she believed that most people were longing to demonstrate their innate goodness.

She knew she wouldn’t be bored – she had a great deal to think about.

She hurried to the lavatory, washed her face and under her arms, but it felt wrong to be out of bed. She thought that with her feet on the floor she would easily be lured downstairs by her own sense of duty. Perhaps in future she would ask her mother for a bucket. She remembered the porcelain potty under her grandmother’s sagging bed – as a child, it had been Ruby’s job to empty the contents early every morning.

Eva lay back on the pillows and quickly fell asleep.’ only to be woken by Brian asking, What have you done with my clean shirts?’

Eva said, ‘I gave them to a passing washerwoman. She’s going to take them to a babbling brook she knows and pummel them on the stones. She’ll have them back by Friday.’