The Woman who Went to Bed for a Year

47

The next day, a Friday, a regional television team of two turned up at the door, requesting an interview with Eva.

Ruby, who had answered the door, said, ‘I’m her mother. I’m Ruby Brown-Bird.’ She immediately recognised the presenter. ‘You’re Derek Plimsoll. I’m a big fan of yours, I watch you every night on the news.’

This was true. Ruby was a great admirer of his. He was so handsome and funny, and always made a little joke at the end of his six o’clock news round-up. Over the years, she had watched his black hair turn grey and his body spread, but he still wore lovely pastel suits and jazzy ties. When he interviewed politicians, he was very respectful. He was never irritated by them when they wouldn’t answer a question – not like that Jeremy Paxman. He was like an old familiar pal. And sometimes, when he said, ‘Goodnight, East Midlands, see you tomorrow,’ she would speak to the screen, and say, ‘Yes, see you tomorrow, Derek.’

The girl with him, who was carrying the camera on a tripod, said, ‘And I’m Jo.’

Ruby didn’t take to her. She was one of those women like Poppy, who wore bright-red lipstick and big boots. Ruby couldn’t make head nor tail of young women today.

She asked them into the kitchen and apologised for the non-existent mess.

Derek wrinkled his suntanned nose and said, ‘What is that delicious smell?’

Ruby said, ‘I’ve got a cake in the oven.’

‘A cake!’ he said, sounding both amazed and delighted. He wagged a plump finger at Ruby and said, ‘Are you sure you’ve not got a bun in the oven?’

Ruby screeched with laughter and put her hands over her face. ‘Me, have a bun in the oven?’ She shrieked again, ‘I’m seventy-nine! I’ve had my womb took away!’

Derek said, ‘I bet you were a proper minx, Ruby. Oh, just the thought of you, my dear, and I’m getting excited.’

Jo rolled her eyes and said to Ruby, ‘D’you see what I have to put up with? He’s an unreconstructed nuisance.’

Derek said, ‘We’re old school, aren’t we, Ruby? We used to enjoy a bit of sexual banter without the Sex Police rounding us up.’

Ruby agreed. ‘I’m scared to open my mouth, these days. Every time I do, I seem to offend somebody or other. I’ve no idea what to call black people any more.’

Jo said, flatly, ‘Black. You call them black.’

Derek said, affecting a West Indian accent, ‘No, we is persons of colour now, innit?’

When Ruby poured the tea, Derek rhapsodised over the teapot. He exclaimed, ‘A teapot, a milk jug, a sugar bowl, china cups and saucers, and apostle spoons!’

Ruby was thrilled that here, at least, was a person who appreciated the niceties of life.

Jo stood the camera on its three legs and fiddled with the lens. She mumbled to Derek, ‘The light is good,’ and switched on.

Derek said to Ruby, ‘Can I ask you a few questions about your daughter?’

Ruby was flattered. ‘Of course you can.’ It had always been her ambition to appear on television.

Derek motioned towards Jo, and said, ‘She’ll need to thread a wire through your clothes, so watch out, Ruby, she bats for the other side.’

Ruby was baffled.

Jo said, ‘He’s trying to tell you that I’m a lesbian, and implying that I would like to sexually assault you.’

Ruby looked a little fearful.

Derek said, ‘It’s all right, Ruby, our Jo has got what they call a “same-sex life partner”, she’s not on the pull.’

After Ruby had applied her fuchsia-pink lipstick, and a small microphone had been clipped on to the neck of her blouse, the interview began.

Derek said, ‘We need to check for sound level. Mrs Brown-Bird, what did you have for breakfast?’

Ruby recited, ‘Two cups of tea, cornflakes, egg, bacon, sausages, black pudding, grilled tomato, fried bread, beans, mushrooms and toast.’

Upstairs, Eva woke from an uneasy dream. She had been running away from Michael Parkinson.

When she was fully awake, she went into her normal routine. She shook her duvet, straightened the pillows and looked out of the window She saw a Mercedes van with East Midlands Tonight written on the side, parked opposite. She could hear voices coming from the kitchen, including her mother’s.

She shouted, ‘Mum!’

After a moment, she heard the kitchen door open, and footsteps in the hall.

Her mother’s voice reached her, complaining about the stairs. ‘These bleddy things will be the death of me.’ She staggered into Eva’s room and sat down heavily on the soup chair. Why don’t you get a stair lift?’ she panted. ‘I can’t go on doing this five or six times a day.’

Eva asked, ‘Who’s downstairs?’

‘Derek Plimsoll and a lesbian.’

Eva looked blank.

‘Derek Plimsoll. You know the one. He’s on the telly. East Midlands Tonight. He makes a joke and taps his papers together at the end.’

Eva nodded.

Well, it’s him, and a lesbian. I’ve just done an interview with them.’ She touched the clip-on microphone.

Eva said, ‘Have you won the accumulator on the Bingo?’

‘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.’

‘This is what I’ve got to say. Fuck off out of my house!’

‘I’m not happy with this,’ Jo said. ‘You’re bullying her, Derek, and I may have to inform Human Resources.’

Derek said, ‘It’s OK, we can lose anything you’re not happy about in the edit.’

‘But I’m not involved in the edit. All I’m allowed to do is point a camera.

‘You weren’t so high-minded when we doorstepped that grieving widow last week.’

‘Which one? There were two grieving widows last week.’

‘The one whose idiot husband fell into the industrial bread mixer.’

‘I wasn’t happy.’

Derek grabbed Jo by the shoulders and said, ‘But that was such an artistic end shot you took – the tears running down her face, that kind of rainbow effect you got.’

Jo said, ‘I shot her tears through a crystal vase. I’m not proud of it. I’m ashamed.’

‘We’re all ashamed in television, deary, but it doesn’t stop us doing it. Never forget, we give the public what they want.’

Derek dropped his voice and murmured to Eva, ‘By the way, can I say how sorry I am that your husband’s about to leave you? You’re probably devastated, aren’t you?’

Eva said, ‘Do you know the meaning of the word “devastated”?’ She didn’t wait for him to answer. ‘It means, “destroyed or ruined, shattered into a thousand pieces”. But here I am, sitting up in bed, in one piece. Now, please close the door behind you.’

As he stamped down the stairs, Derek said, ‘This is why I loathe working with women. They can’t think further than their fanny.’ In a falsetto voice that was meant to be female, he said, ‘Oh dear me, I’m getting emotional and my hormones are taking over and everything must be ethical and from a woman’s point of view!’

They heard a key turn in the lock, and Alexander walked in carrying a large framed painting covered in bubble wrap.

‘Is it you who’s bothering Eva?’ he asked.

Derek said, ‘Are you the Alexander Mrs Brown-Bird’s been telling us about? Friend of the family, eh?’

Alexander said, firmly, ‘Please leave immediately, nobody wants you here.’

‘Look, sunshine, this is a big story in our neck of the woods. It’s not every day we find a saint in suburbia. We’ve got close-up shots of her in the window, we’ve got an interview with the mother, and Barry Wooton has told us his very boring, but very tragic story. All we need is Eva. Just a few words.’

Alexander gave a broad smile, reminding Plimsoll of the pregnant crocodile they’d recently filmed in Twycross Zoo.

‘You interviewed me at the opening of my first exhibition,’ he said. ‘I think I know your introduction by heart. “This is Alexander Tate, he’s a painter, not of the ghetto, not portraits of gang members, not edgy depictions of urban decay. No, Alexander paints watercolours of the English countryside…” Then cue the harpsichord music.’

Derek said, ‘I thought it was a nice little piece.’

Jo said, ‘Derek, you were patronising Alexander, and implying that painting watercolours was an unusual activity for black people.’

Derek said, ‘It is.’

Jo turned to Alexander. ‘My life partner is black. Do you know her – Priscilla Robinson?’

Alexander said, ‘No, funny that. I really ought to know the ten thousand black folk toiling in Leicester’s cotton fields.’

‘Don’t lay that shit at my door, Uncle Tom!’ Jo said, angrily.

Derek Plimsoll sat down heavily on the stairs and said, ‘This is the last time I do house calls. In future, everybody comes to me in the studio.’

Alexander looked down at Derek’s hairline. The white roots would need touching up soon, he thought. It was pitiful.