Eva laughed quietly as he began to run it across her newly clipped toenails. ‘Do you think Jesus was the first chiropodist?’
‘The first famous one,’ said Alexander.
‘Is there a celebrity chiropodist today?’ asked Eva.
‘I dunno. I cut my toenails myself, over a page torn from the London Review of Books. Doesn’t everybody?’
They were talking at normal volume now, conscious that Jade was sleeping the deep sleep that follows misery and exhaustion.
Alexander went out to his van and came back with a bottle of white spirit and a white rag.
Eva said, ‘Are you going out to torch the neighbourhood?’
‘You may have been in bed for months, but there’s no excuse for letting yourself go.’ He dipped the rag into the spirit and wiped the old nail varnish from her fingers and toes. When he’d finished, he said, ‘And now I’m going to “jooge” your hair.’ He produced a tiny pair of scissors from the Swiss Army knife.
Eva laughed. ‘They’re from Grimms’ Fairy Tales! What did you do over the weekend, cut the long grass in a meadow?’
‘Yeah,’ said Alexander, ‘for a wicked elf.’
‘And what would happen to you, if you failed your task?’
‘Seven swans would peck my big brown eyes out,’ he said, and then laughed too.
It took less than fifteen minutes to transform Eva’s hair from ‘Safe Eva’ to ‘Hey Eva!’
‘And finally,’ said Alexander, the magical helper, ‘eyebrows.’ He picked up his knife and, with great concentration, teased out a pair of tweezers so small that they were almost lost between his long fingers. We want quizzical arches, not unusually hirsute caterpillars.’
Eva said, ‘Hirsute?’
‘It means -’
‘I know what it means, I’ve been living with an unusually hirsute man for the last twenty-eight years.’
Eva felt a lightness in her body, a lack of gravity. She had experienced the sensation before when she was a child and a game of make-believe with other children had, for a few moments, soared and fused so that the world of their imagination was more real than the dull everyday world, which consisted mostly of unpleasant things. She felt the beginnings of a wild exhilaration and could hardly keep still enough for Alexander to pluck her brows.
She wanted to dance and sing but, instead, she talked. She felt as though a gag had been removed from her mouth.
Neither of them heard Brian and Titania come in, eat supper, or go to bed.
At half past five in the morning, Alexander said, ‘I’ve gotta go home. My kids are early risers, and their grandma ain’t.’ He looked at Amber’s mother and said, ‘Should we let her sleep?’
‘I don’t want to wake her,’ said Eva. ‘Let her come to life in her own time.’
Alexander picked up the painting and, keeping the bare side of the canvas towards Eva, took it downstairs and left it in the hall.
Eva heard him drive away in the still morning. He had left his Swiss Army knife on the window sill. She picked it up, it was cold to the touch.
She held it in her hands until it was warm.
Eva was kneeling, looking at her reflection in the window, trying to check her Joan of Arc haircut, when Amber’s mother stirred and woke. Eva watched her face and saw the precise moment when the sleepiness left and the stark reality that her child was missing hit her.
‘You shouldn’t have let me sleep!’ she said, scrambling for her shoes and putting them on. She switched her phone on and said, angrily, ‘Amber could have been trying to ring.’ She checked her phone. ‘Nothing,’ she said. ‘So, it’s good news, isn’t it?’ she said, brightly. ‘It means they haven’t found her body, doesn’t it?’
Eva said, ‘I’m sure she’s alive.’
‘You’re sure?’
Jade grabbed at this morsel of optimism as though Eva were the supreme keeper of all knowledge. ‘They said on the internet that you’ve got special powers. Some people said that you’re a witch and you do black magic.’
Eva smiled. ‘I haven’t even got a cat.’
‘I believe that you’re a good person. If we both sit quietly and concentrate, do you think you could find out where she is? Can you see her?’
Eva tried to backtrack, saying, ‘No, I haven’t got extrasensory perception. I’m not a criminologist. I’m not qualified to give an opinion, and I don’t know where Amber is. I’m sorry.’
‘Then why did you say you’re sure she’s alive?’
Eva was disgusted with herself, what she had wanted to say was, ‘Most runaways are found alive.’
‘No, I think you’re right,’ said Amber’s mother. ‘I’d know if she was dead.’
Eva said, ‘A lot of teenage girls run away to London.’
‘She’s been once before. We saw Les Misérables. She said she’d be on the side of the aristocrats. I couldn’t get her into Poundstretcher.’ She was shaking her head. ‘What do I do next?’
‘Have a shower, wash your hair, clean your teeth.’
When Jade emerged from the bathroom, Eva could tell that she was better equipped to face the misery that had threatened to engulf her.
Eva asked, ‘Where are you going now?’
‘I’ve got a cash card, I’ve got petrol. I’ll drive to London and look for her.’
Eva confided, ‘I went to Paris when I was sixteen. My God! Every morning I woke up in a different place, but at least I knew I was living.’
Neither woman was used to outward shows of affection, but they clung to each other for a few moments before Eva let Amber’s mother go.
When she’d left, Eva stared at the white wall opposite, until Amber and Jade had been pushed into a compartment in the very back of her mind. A place that Eva thought of as the hidden side of the moon.
50
As a journey begins with one step, so a crowd begins to collect with one person. Sandy Lake was an aggressively English 41-year-old who thought that if she wore eye-catching colours and a wacky hat, people would be deceived into thinking that she had a ‘quirky, off-beat’ personality. She had been one of the first to shout, ‘Come on, Tim!’ from her seat on Centre Court at Wimbledon – once, daringly, after the umpire had called for silence. She had been reprimanded by the Asian umpire, which she thought was a bit rich.
She had read about Eva on Twitter. Many tweeters said that Eva was a wise woman who had taken to her bed as a protest against how horrid the world was, what with wars and famine, and little babies dying and stuff (though it was partly their mothers’ fault for having too many children and choosing to live miles from the nearest waterhole). She had also read on SingletonsNet that Eva could contact the dead and see into the future.
Sandy felt compelled to be near to Eva. So, the day before yesterday, she had travelled from Dulwich to the pavement opposite Eva’s house, equipped with a popup tent, sleeping bag, a thermal mat, a folding chair, a tiny Primus stove and a box of army rations in case of emergency.
She had researched Eva’s immediate environs and found a pleasant parade of shops. She needed to be within easy walking distance of a newsagent’s. She laughed to others that she was slightly addicted to her celebrity magazines. Nothing gave her more pleasure than seeing a picture of Carol Vorderman with an arrow pointing to her cellulite.
Sandy had inherited the large detached house in Dulwich. It was full of dark heavy furniture, Wilton rugs and swagged curtains. When she was at home, she lived in the kitchen and rarely ventured into the rest of the house. She kept her few clothes on a rail in the former butler’s pantry and slept inside her sleeping bag, on the battered sofa that Mum and Dad’s dogs had slept on.
She had resisted taking ‘silly money’ for the house. She knew it was worth over a million pounds, and that it was a ‘highly desirable residence’, but she had heard that estate agents were untruthful and untrustworthy, and she did not have a best friend to give her advice about money and things.