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

‘No, it’s about you.’

‘Me!’ said Eva.

‘Yes, you,’ said Ruby. ‘Derek Plimsoll reads the Mercury like everybody else in the country. He wants to interview you for what Derek calls “an extended slot”.’

Eva stood up in her bed and stamped up and down on the mattress. She shouted, ‘Absolutely not! I’d rather eat my own vomit! Go downstairs and tell them I decline.’

Ruby said, ‘And the magic word?’

Eva yelled, ‘Please!’

Ruby was not used to Eva shouting at her. She said, tearfully, ‘I thought you’d be happy. It’s television, Eva. It means you’re special. I can’t go down there and tell him you won’t do it. He’ll be disappointed, heartbroken even.

‘He’ll cope,’ said Eva.

Ruby dragged herself out of the chair, muttering, and began her descent.

Once Ruby was back in the kitchen, she told Derek, in a loud whisper, ‘She says no, she’s in decline, and she’d sooner eat her own sick.’ She said to Jo, We had a dog that did that… disgusting! I was glad when it died.’

Derek’s smile slipped. ‘Ruby, I can’t leave this house without interviewing Eva. I am an extremely experienced and respected journalist. I have my professional pride. So, madam, would you please be so kind as to go back upstairs and stress to your daughter that I have interviewed every celebrity to set foot in the East Midlands. I have shadow-boxed with Muhammad Ali. I have asked Mr Nelson Mandela some penetrating questions about his terrorist past and, may God rest her soul, I have flirted with Princess Diana.’ He bent down and whispered in Ruby’s ear, ‘And, by God, did she flirt back at me. I sensed that, had she been alone without her hangers-on, we could have had a few drinks and… well, who knows what might have happened? I was game for it, she was game for it…’ His voice tailed off, and he gave Ruby a salacious wink.

Ruby was a thrilled co-conspirator. She nodded and turned.

Eva was waiting impatiently for the sounds of departure but could hear only her mother, talking to the staircase, saying, ‘It’s all right for you, staircase, all you have to do is stand there, it’s me that has to climb you. Yes, I know you’re creaking, but at least you’re made of wood. When I creak, it’s my poor bones you’re hearing, and it’s painful.’

Eva was not surprised by this.

Her mother had always talked to household objects. Eva had heard her only yesterday, saying, ‘Come on now, iron, don’t run out of steam, I’ve got three of Eva’s nighties to do yet.’

Ruby leaned against the door jamb, trying to get her breath back.

Eva stood on the bed, glaring down at her mother. ‘Well?’ she said. ‘Why haven’t they gone?’

Ruby hissed, ‘You can’t say no to Derek Plimsoll. He interviewed Princess Diana, when she was alive.’

Jo was watching Ruby’s interview on the camera screen. The fuchsia lipstick made her look as though she was haemorrhaging from the mouth.

Ruby was saying, ‘Eva’s always been a bit strange. We thought she was retarded for years, doolally. She used to make up plays in the back garden, using the rabbit in a non-speaking part. They’d practise all day, then I’d have to go out and watch. I’d take some knitting to pass the time. The rabbit was rubbish.’

Jo told Derek, ‘We can’t use any of Ruby’s long shots. She had her legs open, you can see her big knickers.’

Jo was fed up. Her love of cinéma-vérité was the reason she’d studied film at Goldsmith’s, but she’d hoped to work with Mike Leigh and improvising professional actors, not the general public. They were hopelessly inarticulate and usually fell back on familiar phrases, such as ‘It was a nightmare’, ‘We were devastated’, ‘It hasn’t sunk in yet’ and – the old favourite – ‘I’m over the moon’.

Five minutes later, when Eva still hadn’t come down, Derek said, ‘I’ve had enough of all this fart-arsing about, I’m going up. Follow me!’

He was slightly unnerved by the prospect of what was upstairs. He’d had a few nasty surprises in the past, like the 103-year-old man who, when Derek asked for the secret of his longevity, shouted, on a live interview Wanking!’ He whistled the theme from The Exorcist as he slowly climbed the stairs.

Jo said, ‘We’re skating on thin ice here, Derek,’ as she followed him up, filming as she went.

When Derek reached the landing, he hissed at Ruby, ‘Get out of the way, you’re blocking the shot!’ then pushed by her, making her stagger a little.

Jo said, ‘A nice shot of you pushing an old lady aside there, Derek.’

Eva saw Derek Plimsoll and a woman with a camera on her shoulder coming through the door towards her. She shouted, ‘Don’t let them in, Mum! Close the door!’

Ruby didn’t know what to do. Jo was also conflicted; she didn’t like the way this was going. The lovely woman she saw through her lens was obviously terrified, but Jo was surprised by the starkness of the white room. The light was beautiful. She could not turn her camera off, so she adjusted the white balance, and carried on filming.

Eva scrambled under the duvet and shouted, ‘Mum! Mum! Phone Alexander! His number’s in the book!’

Jo managed to film a couple of seconds of the woman’s face before she scrambled under the white duvet.

Derek walked into the shot. He announced, ‘I’m in the bedroom of a woman called Eva Beaver – or, as tens of thousands of people are now calling her, “The Saint of Suburbia”. I was invited into the house by a Mrs Brown-Bird, Eva’s mother, but Eva is a shy, nervous woman who has requested that her face should not be filmed. East Midlands Tonight will honour that plea. She’s there. She’s the lump in the bed.’

Jo’s viewfinder showed a hump under the white duvet.

Eva shouted from under the duvet, ‘Are you still there, Mum?’

Ruby said, ‘Yes, but I can’t tackle them stairs for a bit.’

She plumped herself down in the soup chair. ‘I’ve been up and down like a bleddy pogo stick. I’m seventy-nine. I’m too old for this carry-on. I’ve got a cake downstairs I’m neglecting.’

Derek shouted, ‘Mrs Brown-Bird, we’re trying to film here! Please do not talk, whistle or sing.’

Ruby got out of the chair and said, ‘I’m not staying here, if I’m not wanted.’

She staggered to the banisters on the landing and leaned heavily against them until she felt able to go downstairs to the kitchen, where she began to look for Eva’s phone book. Alexander’s name was the first number in it, in his own handwriting. Ruby sat down at the kitchen table and laboriously pressed buttons on the phone.

He answered immediately, saying, ‘Eva?’

‘No, Ruby. She wants you to come round. There’s some television people here and she wants them gone.’

‘What? She wants a bouncer?’

‘Yes, she wants you to come and chuck them out of the house,’ said Ruby, expanding on Eva’s instructions.

‘Why choose me? I’m not a street-fighting man.’

Ruby said, ‘Yes, but people are more frightened of black men, aren’t they?’

Alexander laughed down the phone. ‘OK, I’ll be there in five minutes. I’ll bring my deadly paintbrushes, shall I?’

Ruby said, ‘Good, because I’m fed up with all this argy-bargy. I’m going home.’

She placed the phone carefully in its charger, put on her hat and coat, took her shopping bag from the back of the kitchen door and went out into the cold afternoon.

Eva had persuaded Jo to switch the camera off and was sitting up in bed with her arms folded, looking – in Derek’s eyes – like a modern Joan of Arc.

Derek said, ‘Now, are you going to be sensible, and give me a face-to-face interview in your own words, or do I have to speak on your behalf? If so, you may not like what I have to say.’