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

When she thought about it, she realised that she had always liked angels, and her favourite carol was ‘Hark The Herald Angels Sing’. Yes, it all made sense now:

Daddy had called her ‘my little angel’, even though she was twice the size of him. Now she was fifteen stone eleven pounds, dangerously near the weight limit of her folding chair.

Eva first saw Sandy and Penelope when she woke from a deep, dreamless sleep.

She looked out of the window at two middle-aged women on the opposite pavement, one wearing a fun Noddy hat with a bell on the end, the other using binoculars that were trained on her window.

They both waved, and Eva automatically waved back – before dipping down out of sight.

Two miles away, Abdul Anwar sat at the kitchen table yawning, watching his wife fill his tiffin tin with small aluminium containers with screw-on lids. He glanced down at the photographs of Eva and his fellow taxi driver Barry Wooton on the torn-out front page of the Leicester Mercury.

Abdul’s wife, Aisha, was cooking chapattis for the evening meal – though Abdul would not be there. He was about to go on night shift. She always made him a meal, which he ate from his collection of silvery aluminium pots. His children called it ‘Dad’s picnic’.

He said, ‘Aisha, be sure to post a copy of the article to our family. I have spoken to them before about my friend Barry.’

She said, ‘I won’t send it by snail mail, I’ll scan it in. You are still living in the past, Abdul.’

While both of her hands were occupied with a chapatti, Abdul got up and put his arms around her waist. He glanced down at the flat pan where his wife was pressing the uncooked side of a chapatti with a bunched-up tea towel. When she flipped it over with her fingers, he gasped and said, ‘May Allah be blessed! It is the woman in bed, the saint!’

Aisha said, ‘Praise be to God!’ and turned the stove off.

They examined the chapatti together. It looked uncannily like Eva’s face. The black and brown well-done pieces made up her eyes, eyebrows, lips and nostrils. Her hair was represented by the excess chapatti flour. Abdul brought the front page to the stove and compared the two. Neither man nor wife could quite believe what they were looking at.

Aisha said, ‘We will wait for it to cool. It may change.’ She hoped it wouldn’t change. She remembered when the Hindu baker had found Elvis Presley in a doughnut. The shop had been besieged. Then, after three days of exposure, Elvis had looked more like Keith Vaz, the local MP, who had subsequently increased his majority at the next general election.

When the chapatti was cold, Abdul took photographs and filmed Aisha at the stove, standing between Eva’s picture and what Anwar was later to call ‘the blessed chapatti’ on Radio Leicester.

After Abdul had left for work, forgetting his tiffin tin in the excitement, Aisha sat at the computer desk in the space beneath the stairs. She created a Facebook page for ‘The Woman in Bed’ in ten minutes, then set up a link to her own page, calling it ‘Eva – the saint appears in Aisha Anwar’s chapatti’. It was a thrill for her to press the key that sent it to her 423 friends.

By next morning, Bowling Green Road was chock-a-block with cars. There was a cacophony of car horns, Bollywood music and excited and angry voices as people tried to park.

Ruby was flustered when she opened the door to three bearded men, who asked if they could see the ‘Special One’. Ruby said, ‘Not today, thank you,’ and closed the door.

Meanwhile, queues had formed outside Aisha Anwar’s house, and she was obliged to take them through to see the resemblance between Wali Eva’ and the face on the chapatti. Aisha was also obliged to offer her visitors food and drink, but after hearing one of them say, in a loud whisper, ‘Her kitchen’s a seventies antique. Those orange tiles!’ she regretted her impulsiveness, and fantasized about eating the Eva chapatti with aloo gobi and dhal.

Over the next week, Eva remembered more of what she had learned at her junior and secondary schools. The world’s longest river. The capital of Peru. Which countries constitute Scandinavia. The nine times table. How many pints there were in a gallon. How many inches in a yard. Britain’s principal manufacturing industries. How many soldiers were killed on the first day of the First World War. How old was Juliet. The poetry she had learned by heart: ‘I must go down to the seas again, to the lonely sea and the sky’, ‘Hail to thee, blithe Spirit!’, ‘Fools! For I also had my hour; / One far fierce hour and sweet’. And during this time, the crowd grew and became a constant background noise.

There were complaints from the neighbours about the inconvenience, and the parking problem escalated. But it wasn’t until some of the residents were unable to park in their own road and were forced to leave their cars half a mile or more away that the police became involved.

Unfortunately, Constable Gregory Hawk found it impossible to park anywhere near Eva’s house, and had to walk an uncomfortably long distance. When he finally reached the front door, he found Ruby sitting outside in the early spring sunshine, selling tea and slices of fruit cake from a trestle table in Eva’s front garden. She had put a daffodil in a posy vase on the table to help attract customers, and was charging variable rates which were entirely dependent on whether or not she liked the look of them.

PC Hawk was about to ascertain whether Ruby had a trading licence and a food hygiene certificate, and had completed the paperwork for a risk assessment, when he was diverted by an outside broadcast truck that was backing down the road, only narrowly avoiding the cars parked on either side. After informing the driver that there was nowhere legal to park, he returned to the trestle table in time to hear Ruby shouting, ‘Next for the toilets!’ and to see a man in Druid’s headgear and robes leave the house, while a woman with ‘Eva’ painted on her forehead entered.

PC Hawk tried to remember whether charging the public to visit a private lavatory was a civil or criminal offence.

When he approached Ruby, she said that the pounds she had in her anorak pockets were donations to the Brown Bird & Beaver Charity. PC Hawk asked if this charity was registered with the Charity Commission, and was told that the registration was ‘in the post’.

He then moved to the crowd of what he thought of as ‘weirdos’, warning them that if they didn’t stop singing, ululating, tinkling bells and chanting ‘Eva! Eva! Eva!’ he would charge them all with a breach of the peace.

An anarchist in an army greatcoat, camouflage trousers and a black polo-neck sweater had spent an hour writing ‘HELP THE POLICE – BEAT YOURSELF Up’ on his forehead. He shouted feebly, ‘We’re living in a Police State.’

PC Hawk’s hand twitched towards his Taser, but he was reassured when a bulky woman in a Noddy hat said, ‘England is the best country in the world, and our police are absolutely terrific!’

The anarchist gave a harsh laugh.

PC Hawk said, ‘Thank you, madam, it’s nice to be appreciated.’

He thought the whole set-up was a disgrace. There were Asian people everywhere he looked, some on their knees praying, some sitting on a blanket having what looked like breakfast, and a large gang of elderly Muslim, Christian and Hindu women had gathered under Eva’s window, clapping and singing. There were no crowd barriers, no surveillance team, nobody directing the traffic. He rang for reinforcements, then walked over to the two old women standing in the doorway of number 15.

He demanded of Yvonne that he be taken to see the householder.