When Brian pressed the button to summon the groaning lift, Poppy slipped in beside him and said, ‘This lift’s awfully slow. I sometimes think that I’m in a Samuel Beckett play.’
Brian laughed. He had played Lucky in a student production of Waiting for Godot and had won praise for his ‘frenetic energy’.
While they slowly ascended to the sixth floor, Poppy told Brian that her parents were in a coma at Ninewells Hospital in Dundee. It was the first time she would be alone at Christmas, she told him.
Brian thought she might cry. His heart went out to her.
Poppy had a quick flash of memory. It was the Ninewells Hospital Wikipedia page. She gave him a big brave smile and said, ‘But Mum and Dad are lucky, in a way. They’re in the first Frank Gehry building in Britain. Bob Geldof opened it. I can’t wait to tell them…, when they wake up.’
‘Yeah, I like Gehry’s work,’ said Brian. ‘Very space age. It’s much like the module we intend to build, well, on the moon.’ When she asked him what he did for a living, he said, ‘I’m Dr Brian Beaver, I’m an astronomer. ‘Poppy squealed and clapped her hands together.
‘Wow!’ she said. ‘That’s what I want to be! What an amazing coincidence!’
Brian agreed, and said, ‘It is, indeed, amazing.’
Then she slapped her hand over her mouth and said, ‘OMG! You must be Brianne’s dad, he’s an astronomer!’
‘Guilty as charged,’ said Brian. He thought Poppy was a sweetheart, enchanting, with her wild hair and pale skin. Her sinewy, exotic sexuality diverted him from asking any further questions about her unlikely astronomical aspirations.
‘So, what will you do for Christmas?’ he asked. ‘Where will you go?’
‘Oh, I’ll just stay here and go out for walks. I’ve no money. I’ve spent it all visiting Mum and Dad,’ she explained, wistfully.
There was a companionable silence for a moment.
‘So, you know Brianne?’
‘Know her? We’re the best of friends. I can’t bear the thought of being apart from her for four whole weeks.’
She smiled bravely, but Brian could see that the poor kid was crying inside. He didn’t take long to decide. When they got out of the lift, he told her to pack a bag and gave her his car keys.
‘When you’re ready, go and sit in the silver Peugeot Estate. It’ll be a fantastic surprise for the twins.’
Poppy fell on his neck, uttering thanks and other appreciative sounds that were not quite words.
Brian held her tight, laughing at first, but as she continued her iron grip around his neck he began to take notice of her young, firm flesh and the musky perfume she wore. He instructed himself to think about the gristly meat he had been forced to swallow at school dinners – it usually did the trick.
The twins travelled down in the lift, leaving their father to use Brian Junior’s en-suite lavatory in preparation for the hundred-mile journey back to Leicester.
Brianne said, ‘Four weeks without that crazy cow.’
Brian Junior smiled one of his rare smiles. Before the lift door opened, they unsuccessfully executed a high five.
Brianne said, ‘Brian Junior, you never get the timing right! How many have we practised? You must be hopeless in bed. You have absolutely no sense of rhythm.’
‘I had enough to impregnate Poppy.’
‘You can’t make a woman pregnant if you keep your underpants on and don’t get an erection.’
‘I know that! I also know that if you don’t let the sperm out, your balls explode.’
They left the warmth of the building and emerged into a confluence of harsh winds and snow flurries. They approached their father’s car and saw somebody sitting in the front passenger seat.
As they neared the car the front passenger door opened, and Poppy shouted, ‘Surprise!’
The journey was horrible.
The boot was full of Poppy’s suitcases and black bin liners bulging with her mad clothes and customised boots and shoes. Brianne and Brian Junior sat uncomfortably with their own luggage jammed in around them.
Poppy talked all the way from Leeds to Leicester. If he hadn’t been driving, Brian would have sat at her feet -as if she were Homer and wise beyond her years.
He thought, ‘She’s the daughter I should have had, a girl whose shoe size is smaller than mine. Who takes forever in the bathroom, titivating herself- unlike Brianne, who sounds like a grunting pig when she washes her face and is out of the bathroom in two minutes.’
Brian Junior thought about the tadpole baby inside Poppy’s womb. He couldn’t remember what had happened on the night she came into his bed. The images he summoned up were a tangle of arms and legs and heat and a fish-finger smell, the clash of teeth, of rapid breathing, and an unimaginably wonderful feeling of falling away out of his mortal body and into an unexpected universe.
Brianne wanted to rid the world of Poppy, and spent the journey planning in detail how it could be done.
As they turned off the motorway at junction 21 Brian tried to prepare the twins for the ‘changes in our domestic arrangements’.
He told them, ‘Mum’s been a bit off colour.’
‘Is that why she hasn’t phoned us for three months?’ said Brianne bitterly.
Poppy turned her head and said, ‘That’s shocking – a mother not ringing her children.’
Brian said, ‘You’re right, Poppy.’
Brian Junior said to Brianne, ‘We could have kept trying.’
28
Eva was longing to hold the twins in her arms, especially since she wouldn’t have to clean their rooms or put clean sheets on their beds, and somebody else would be responsible for their meals and buying their Christmas presents. And perhaps it was Brian’s turn to be irritated by their sloth and mess.
‘Yes,’ she thought. ‘Yes, let somebody else grovel under their beds and retrieve the cereal bowls with the dried-on milk and sugar, and the mugs and plates. The brown apple cores, dried banana peel and the dirty socks.’ She laughed out loud in her pure, white room.
Brianne and Brian Junior were shocked when they saw their mother sitting up in bed in the white box that used to be their parents’ bedroom. Eva held her arms wide open, and the twins shuffled into them.
She could not speak. She was overcome with the pleasure of holding them, of feeling their bodies – which had perceptibly changed in the three months since she had last seen them.
Brianne needed her hair cutting. Eva thought, ‘I’ll give her sixty quid, so she can go somewhere decent.’
Brian Junior was agitated – Eva could feel the tightening of his muscles – and unusually he had allowed several days’ worth of stubble to grow on his face, which she thought made him resemble a blond Orlando Bloom. However, Brianne’s black facial hair cried out for a waxing appointment.
They pulled away from her and sat awkwardly on the edge of the bed.
Eva said, ‘Well, tell me everything. Are you happy at Leeds?’
The twins looked at each other, and Brianne said, ‘We are, apart from -Eva heard somebody downstairs exclaim, ‘Wow, I already feel at home!’
The twins exchanged another look, and they got up and hurried out.
Brian shouted upstairs, ‘Twins, help me with this luggage!’
There was a thundering of footsteps on the stairs and landing, and then a strange-looking girl in a tatty cocktail dress, which she wore with an old man’s dressing gown, the cord of which she had wound around her head Gaddafi-style, threw herself into Eva’s arms. Eva patted her back and shoulders and noticed that the girl’s white bra straps were filthy.
‘Bob Geldof has been keeping a twenty-four-hour vigil at the side of my parents’ beds,’ announced the extraordinary girl.