She heard Brian stabbing at the keys again.
Brian was always slightly apprehensive when he called his mother. His tongue couldn’t form words properly.
She had a way of making him feel guilty, whatever the subject of the conversation.
His mother answered promptly with a snappy, ‘Yes?’
Brian said, ‘Is that you, Mummy?’
Eva picked up the extension again, being careful to muffle the mouthpiece with her hand.
‘Who else would it be? Nobody else phones this house. I’m on my own seven days a week.’
Brian said, ‘But… er… you… er… don’t like visitors.’
‘No, I don’t like visitors but it would be nice to have to turn them away. Anyway, what is it? I’m halfway through Emmerdale.’
Brian said, ‘Sorry, Mummy. Do you want to ring me back when the adverts come on?’
‘No,’ she said. ‘Let’s get it over with, whatever it is.’
‘It’s Eva.’
‘Ha! Why am I not surprised? Has she left you? The first time I clapped eyes on that girl I knew she’d break your heart.’
Brian wondered if his heart had ever been broken. He had always had difficulty in recognising an emotion. When he had brought his First Class Bachelor of Science degree home to show his mother, her current boyfriend had said, ‘You must be very happy, Brian.’
Brian had nodded his head and forced a smile, but the truth was that he didn’t feel any happier than he had felt the day before, when nothing remarkable had happened.
His mother had taken the embossed certificate, examined it carefully and said, ‘You’ll struggle to find an astronomy job. There are men with more superior qualifications than you’ve got who can’t find work.’
Now Brian said, mournfully, ‘Eva’s gone to bed in her clothes and shoes.’
His mother said, ‘I can’t say I’m surprised, Brian. She’s always brought attention to herself. Do you remember when we all went to the caravan that Easter in 1986? She took a suitcase full of her ridiculous beatnik clothes. You don’t wear beatnik clothes at Wells-Next-The-Sea. Everybody was staring at her.’
Eva screamed from upstairs, ‘You shouldn’t have thrown my lovely black clothes into the sea!’
Brian hadn’t heard his wife scream before.
Yvonne Beaver asked, ‘What’s that screaming?’
Brian lied. ‘It’s the television. Somebody’s just won a lot of money on Eggheads.’
His mother said, ‘She looked very presentable in the holiday wear I bought her.’
As Eva listened, she remembered taking the hideous clothes out of the carrier bag. They had smelled as if they had been in a damp warehouse in the Far East for years, and the colours were lurid mauves, pinks and yellows. There had been a pair of what Eva thought looked like men’s sandals and a beige, pensioner-style anorak. When she tried them on, she looked twenty years older.
Brian said to his mother, ‘I don’t know what to do, Mummy.’
Yvonne said, ‘She’s probably drunk. Leave her to sleep it off.’
Eva threw the phone across the room and screamed, ‘They were men’s sandals she bought me in Wells-Next-The-Sea! I saw men wearing them with white socks! You should have protected me from her, Brian! You should have said, “My wife would not be seen dead in these hideous sandals!”‘
She had screamed so loudly that her throat hurt. She shouted downstairs and asked Brian to bring her a glass of water.
Brian said, ‘Hang on, Mummy. Eva wants a glass of water.’
His mother hissed down the phone, ‘Don’t you dare fetch her that water, Brian! You’ll be making a rod for your own back if you do. Tell her to get her own water!’
Brian didn’t know what to do. While he dithered in the hallway his mother said, ‘I could do without this trouble. My knee has been playing me up. I was on the verge of ringing my consultant and asking him to chop my leg off.’
He took the phone into the kitchen with him and ran the cold tap.
His mother asked, ‘Is that water I can hear running?’
Brian lied again. ‘Just topping up a vase of flowers.’
‘Flowers! You’re lucky you can afford flowers.’
‘They’re out of the garden, Mummy. Eva grew them from seed.’
‘You’re lucky to have the space for a garden.’
The phone went dead. His mother never said goodbye.
He went upstairs with the glass of cold water. When he handed it to Eva, she took a small sip, then put it on the crowded bedside table. Brian hovered at the end of the bed. There was nobody to tell him what to do.
She almost felt sorry for him, but not enough to get out of bed. Instead, she said, Why don’t you go downstairs and watch your programmes?’
Brian was a devotee of property programmes. His heroes were Kirstie and Phil. Unbeknown to Eva he had written to Kirstie, saying that she always looked nice, and was she married to Phil or was their partnership purely a business arrangement? He had received a reply three months later, saying ‘Thank you for your interest’ and signed ‘Yours, Kirstie’. Enclosed was a photograph of Kirstie. She was wearing a red dress and showing an alarming amount of bosom. Brian kept the photograph inside an old Bible. He knew it would be safe there. Nobody ever opened it.
Later that night, a full bladder forced Eva out of bed. She changed from her day clothes into a pair of pyjamas that she had been keeping for emergency hospital admittance. This was on her mother’s advice. Her mother believed that if your dressing gown, pyjamas and sponge bag were good quality, the nurses and doctors treated you better than the scruffs who came into hospital with their shoddy things in a Tesco’s carrier bag.
Eva got back into bed and wondered what her children were doing on their first night at university. She imagined them sitting in a room together, weeping and homesick, as they had done when they first went to nursery school.
2
Brianne was in the communal kitchen and lounge of the accommodation block. So far she had met a boy dressed like a girl, and a woman dressed like a man. They were both talking about clubs and musicians she’d never heard of.
Brianne had a short attention span and soon stopped listening, but she nodded her head and said ‘Cool’ when it seemed appropriate. She was a tall girl with broad shoulders, long legs and big feet. Her face was mostly hidden behind a long straggly black fringe which she pushed out of her eyes only when she actually wanted to see something.
A waiflike girl in a leopard-print maxi dress and tan Ugg boots came in with a bulging bag from Holland & Barrett which she stuffed into the fridge. Half her head had been shaved and a broken heart tattooed on to her scalp. The other half was a badly dyed lopsided green curtain.
Brianne said, ‘Amazing hair. Did you do it yourself?’
‘I got my brother to help me,’ the girl said. ‘He’s a poofter.’
The girl’s sentences had a rising inflection as though she were permanently questioning the validity of her own statements.
Brianne asked, ‘Are you Australian?’
The girl shouted, ‘God! No!’
Brianne said, ‘I’m Brianne.’
The girl said, ‘I’m Poppy. Brianne? I haven’t heard that before.’
‘My dad’s called Brian,’ said Brianne tonelessly. ‘Is it hard to walk in a maxi?’
‘No’, said Poppy. ‘Try it on if you like. It might stretch to fit you.’
She pulled the maxi dress over her head and stood revealed in a wispy bra and knickers. They both looked as though they had been made from scarlet cobwebs. She seemed to have no inhibitions whatsoever. Brianne had many inhibitions. She hated everything about herself: face, neck, hair, shoulders, arms, hands, fingernails, belly, breasts, nipples, waist, hips, thighs, knees, calves, ankles, feet, toenails and voice.