The Woman who Went to Bed for a Year

4

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.’

Brian, who had not been listening, shouted, ‘Friday! That’s no good to me! I need one now!’

Eva turned over to face the window. A few golden leaves were spiralling down from the sycamore outside. She said, ‘You don’t have to wear a shirt. It’s not a condition of your employment. Professor Brady dresses as if he was in The Rolling Stones.’

‘It’s bloody embarrassing.” said Brian. ‘We had a delegation from NASA last week. Every last one of them was in a blazer, collar and tie, and they were shown round by Brady in his creaking leather trousers, Yoda T-shirt and down-at-heel cowboy boots! On his salary! All the bloody cosmologists are the same. And when they’re together in the one room, it looks like a meeting in a drug rehabilitation unit! I’m telling you, Eva, if it wasn’t for we astronomers they’d be dead in the water!’

Eva turned back to him and said, ‘Wear your navy polo shirt, your chinos and your brown brogues.’ She wanted him out of her room. She would ask her uneducated mother to show Dr Brian Beaver BSc, MSc, D Phil (Oxon) how to manipulate the simple dials on the washing machine.

Before Brian left the room she asked him, ‘Do you think there is a God, Brian?’

He was sitting on the bed, tying his shoelaces. ‘Don’t tell me you’ve got religion, Eva. It always ends in tears. According to Steve Hawking’s latest book, God’s not fit for purpose. He’s a character in a fairy tale.’

‘Then why do so many millions of people believe in him?’

‘Look, Eva, the stats are against it. Something can actually come from nothing. Heisenbergian uncertainty allows a bubble of space-time to inflate out of nowhere…’ He paused. ‘But I admit the particle side is… difficult. The string theory supersymmetry boys really need to find the Higgs boson. And the wave function collapse is always a problem.’

Eva nodded, and said, ‘I see. Thank you.’

He groomed his beard with Eva’s comb and said, ‘So, how long do you intend to stay in bed?’

‘Where does the universe end?’ asked Eva.

Brian fiddled with his beard, twirling the scraggy end between his fingers. ‘Can you tell me why you want to retreat from the world, Eva?’

‘I don’t know how to live in it,’ she said. ‘I can’t even work the remote. I preferred it when there were three channels and all you had to do was go duh, duh, duh.’

She stabbed at the imaginary knobs on the imaginary television.

‘So, you’re going to loll about in bed because you can’t work the remote?’

Eva muttered, ‘I can’t work the new oven stroke grill stroke microwave either. And I can’t work out how much we’re paying EON per quarter on our electricity bill. Do we owe them money, Brian, or do they owe us?’

‘I don’t know,’ he admitted. He took her hand and said, ‘I’ll see you tonight. By the way, is sex off the menu?’