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

There was a timid ringing of the doorbell.

Eva froze.

Alexander said, ‘I’ll go.’

After he had left, Eva thought hard about the first time she had heard of the dog Cerberus.

She was in a classroom, rain was battering the long windows. She was worried because she had forgotten her fountain pen again, and at any moment the class would be asked to write something down. Mrs Holmes, her English teacher, was telling thirty-six twelve-year old girls a story.

Eva could smell the teacher’s scent – it was a mixture of Evening in Paris and Vicks vapour rub.

Alexander reappeared. ‘There’s a woman downstairs who read about you on the internet and is desperate to see you.

‘Well, I’m not desperate to see her,’ snapped Eva.

‘Her daughter has been missing for three weeks.’

‘But why would she come to me? A woman who can’t get out of bed?’

‘She’s convinced you can help her,’ said Alexander. ‘She’s driven from Sheffield. The kid is called Amber, she’s thirteen years old -’

Eva cut in, ‘You shouldn’t have told me her name or her age, I’ve got the child inside my head now’ She picked up a pillow and screamed into it.

Alexander said, ‘So that’s a no, is it?’

Amber’s mother, Jade, had not allowed herself to bathe, shower or wash her hair, and she had not changed her clothes since her daughter’s disappearance. She was still wearing the baby-pink tracksuit, now grey with dirt, that she had been wearing on the day Amber went missing.

‘Amber was a happy, bubbly girl. I would normally have driven her to school but we got up late, I wasn’t dressed. We didn’t have time to make her a packed lunch. I was going to make it up and take it to her later. She wouldn’t have been abducted… she’s not pretty enough. She’s big-boned. She’s got awful hair. She’s got a brace on her top teeth. She wouldn’t have been abducted… these perverts go for prettier girls on the whole, don’t they?’

Eva nodded, then asked, ‘When was the last time you slept?’

‘Oh, I mustn’t sleep or have a shower, and I can’t wash my hair until Amber is back. I lie down on the settee at night with the Sky news on, in case there’s word about her. My mother blames me. My husband blames me. I blame me. Do you know where Amber is, Eva?’

‘No, I don’t,’ said Eva. ‘Lie down next to me.’

When Alexander brought tea up for Eva and Jade, he found them fast asleep, side by side. He felt a painful stab of jealousy, Jade was in his place. He started to back out of the room but Eva heard a floorboard creak and opened her eyes.

She smiled when she saw him, and carefully slid from under the duvet to the end of the bed, where she sat with her legs dangling.

Alexander noticed that her toenails needed cutting and that the pink varnish on them had almost vanished. Without speaking, he took out the Swiss Army knife his wife had given him. It had many tools within it, and was a bulky weight, but Alexander kept it close to him at all times. He took Eva’s right foot, put it on his lap, and whispered, ‘Pretty feet, but the toenails of a slut.’

Eva smiled.

Jade was still sleeping. Eva hoped that she was dreaming of Amber, that they were together, in a place where they had been happy.

When Alexander had carefully trimmed all of Eva’s toenails, he pressed the clippers back into the body of the knife and pulled out a small metal file.

Eva laughed quietly as he began to run it across her newly clipped toenails. ‘Do you think Jesus was the first chiropodist?’

‘The first famous one,’ said Alexander.

‘Is there a celebrity chiropodist today?’ asked Eva.

‘I dunno. I cut my toenails myself, over a page torn from the London Review of Books. Doesn’t everybody?’

They were talking at normal volume now, conscious that Jade was sleeping the deep sleep that follows misery and exhaustion.

Alexander went out to his van and came back with a bottle of white spirit and a white rag.

Eva said, ‘Are you going out to torch the neighbourhood?’

‘You may have been in bed for months, but there’s no excuse for letting yourself go.’ He dipped the rag into the spirit and wiped the old nail varnish from her fingers and toes. When he’d finished, he said, ‘And now I’m going to “jooge” your hair.’ He produced a tiny pair of scissors from the Swiss Army knife.

Eva laughed. ‘They’re from Grimms’ Fairy Tales! What did you do over the weekend, cut the long grass in a meadow?’

‘Yeah,’ said Alexander, ‘for a wicked elf.’

‘And what would happen to you, if you failed your task?’

‘Seven swans would peck my big brown eyes out,’ he said, and then laughed too.

It took less than fifteen minutes to transform Eva’s hair from ‘Safe Eva’ to ‘Hey Eva!’

‘And finally,’ said Alexander, the magical helper, ‘eyebrows.’ He picked up his knife and, with great concentration, teased out a pair of tweezers so small that they were almost lost between his long fingers. We want quizzical arches, not unusually hirsute caterpillars.’

Eva said, ‘Hirsute?’

‘It means -’

‘I know what it means, I’ve been living with an unusually hirsute man for the last twenty-eight years.’

Eva felt a lightness in her body, a lack of gravity. She had experienced the sensation before when she was a child and a game of make-believe with other children had, for a few moments, soared and fused so that the world of their imagination was more real than the dull everyday world, which consisted mostly of unpleasant things. She felt the beginnings of a wild exhilaration and could hardly keep still enough for Alexander to pluck her brows.

She wanted to dance and sing but, instead, she talked. She felt as though a gag had been removed from her mouth.

Neither of them heard Brian and Titania come in, eat supper, or go to bed.

At half past five in the morning, Alexander said, ‘I’ve gotta go home. My kids are early risers, and their grandma ain’t.’ He looked at Amber’s mother and said, ‘Should we let her sleep?’

‘I don’t want to wake her,’ said Eva. ‘Let her come to life in her own time.’

Alexander picked up the painting and, keeping the bare side of the canvas towards Eva, took it downstairs and left it in the hall.

Eva heard him drive away in the still morning. He had left his Swiss Army knife on the window sill. She picked it up, it was cold to the touch.

She held it in her hands until it was warm.

Eva was kneeling, looking at her reflection in the window, trying to check her Joan of Arc haircut, when Amber’s mother stirred and woke. Eva watched her face and saw the precise moment when the sleepiness left and the stark reality that her child was missing hit her.

‘You shouldn’t have let me sleep! ’ she said, scrambling for her shoes and putting them on. She switched her phone on and said, angrily, ‘Amber could have been trying to ring.’ She checked her phone. ‘Nothing,’ she said. ‘So, it’s good news, isn’t it?’ she said, brightly. ‘It means they haven’t found her body, doesn’t it?’

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.’