The Woman who Went to Bed for a Year

66

Alexander heard a police siren, but he carried on painting. He had waited for the sun to rise over the far corner of the cornfield. He had almost given up before he had properly begun. The loveliness of the corn as it responded to the breeze was, given his limited skills, too fine to capture with a brush and watercolours.

Almost an hour passed before he stopped. He unwrapped the tinfoil from his cheese sandwiches, and unscrewed the lid of his Thermos flask. Why did coffee always smell better than it tasted?

As he ate and drank, he was conscious that he was happy. His children were well, he had no serious debts, his paintings were beginning to sell – slowly. And now that his locks were gone, he could go into a shop without the shopkeeper hovering over the panic button.

He forced himself not to think about Eva, who he had not seen for what seemed like an eternity.

He and Eva had never sat at a table together and shared a meal. They had not danced together. He didn’t know her favourite song, and now he never would.

Ruby was glad she had Stanley to talk to. She told him about Eva’s increasingly erratic recent behaviour, singing and reciting poems and making lists. She also confided that Eva wanted her door to be boarded up, apart from an aperture that would enable food and drink to be passed through.

Stanley said, ‘I don’t want to alarm you, Ruby, but that does sound fairly mad.’

Peter had boarded the door up, with Eva passing him the nails. By the time Ruby came back from tea at Stanley’s house, the job was done.

There is nothing Eva can do now but sort out her memories, and wait to see who will keep her alive.

There is a chink of light in Eva’s room. It comes from the badly boarded-up window It shines on to the wall opposite. Eva lies in bed and watches the intensity of the light. Just before the sun goes down, the light puts on a show of orange, pink and yellow The colours of confectionery. The chink of light is vital to her. She has put it there herself and now she is terrified that somebody will take it away.

She wants to be a baby and start again. From the stories Ruby tells about Eva’s infancy, she has concluded that it was grim: she was pushed to the bottom of the garden to scream. Ruby’s voice came to her when the twins were babies. ‘Don’t pick them up when they cry, you’ll mollycoddle them. They need to know who’s boss from the start.’

Whenever Eva tried to cuddle the twins, their little bodies would go rigid and two sets of eyes would stare into her own without even the ghost of a smile.