They had been lying together, looking up at a Victorian brass light fitting which Poppy was afraid might fall from its mountings and kill them both. She wouldn’t want to be found all mashed up with an old fat bloke who was nearly a pensioner.
She had placed his free hand on her belly and said, ‘Bri, we’re going to have a baby.’
Brian was not keen on babies. After the twins were born, he had volunteered to work in Australia but had been turned down on the grounds that he was now ‘a family man’.
After a tiny pause, he had said, ‘How marvellous.’
She could tell he didn’t want the baby. She didn’t want Brian either. But whoever had said life was just a bowl of cherries had forgotten that inside each cherry was a hard stone, waiting to catch the unwary, resulting in a chipped tooth, a choking fit, slipping and falling.
All caused by those innocuous little cherry stones.
Now there was a gentle knock at the door. Brian leapt to his feet, pulled Eva’s comb through his beard and opened the door.
Poppy said, ‘What took you so long?’ She was wearing an orange poppy in her hair, and a flower-sprigged prom dress with Mary Jane shoes. She was not wearing her new piercings, and she had washed her face clean of make-up.
When Brian opened the door she was dismayed to see that he was in an old git’s dressing gown and the type of slippers that cartoonists draw He was also carrying a mug of Horlicks, the smell of which made Poppy heave. What Poppy saw when the door opened was the grandfather illustration in her Heidi book. Brian’s beard hadn’t turned white yet, but it would not be long. His ankles looked so frail and pasty in the big slippers that she was surprised they could hold him up without snapping. He pulled her inside as though he were taking delivery of Semtex.
Brian said, ‘Darling, you look so sweet, so charming, so young.’
Poppy sat on the end of the bed with her little finger crooked in the side of her mouth.
‘In other circumstances she would have looked gormless,’ thought Brian. But this was his Poppy, the mercurial child/woman whose presence he craved. He turned on the MP3 player that he had dug out of a drawer at home for the occasion. He searched the short playlist, found Songs for Swingin’ Lovers, selected ‘You Make Me Feel So Young’ and pressed play.
‘Ugh!’ thought Poppy. ‘More of that dead bloke, Frank Sinatra.’
When Poppy went into the bathroom, Brian lay on the bed and arranged the dressing gown so that his pale upper thighs were exposed. Because his feet had hard skin and corns, he kept his slippers on.
When she came out of the bathroom, she was naked apart from the flower in her hair. Before she turned the light off, her slightly swollen belly was in profile.
Brian thought, ‘I wonder if it has been scientifically proven that Homo sapiens can actually expire from a surfeit of love? If so, I’m a dying man.’
Poppy gritted her teeth, and thought, ‘C’mon, Poppy, come on, girl, it’ll all be over in five minutes. Close your eyes and think of Brian Junior.’
After the little struggle on the bed was over, and Brian lay on his back gasping for air, Poppy looked down at him and thought, ‘He looks like an overfed, dying goldfish.’ She said, Wow! That was awesome! Wow! Wow! Amazing!’
Brian thought, ‘Eva never once responded to my lovemaking like Poppy does.’
Poppy climbed off him and went back into the bathroom. He heard the shower over the bath running, and for a moment he thought about joining her. But his knees had been giving him gip lately and he wasn’t sure if he could lift his legs over the side of the bath. He suspected arthritis, it was in the Beaver family genes.
Poppy stayed in the shower for a long time. She spent most of it sitting in the bath and watching the hot water spiralling down the plughole.
When she got out, Brian was in a deep sleep. She found £250 in his wallet and, on the ‘personal details’ page of his Letts Diary, the code to his debit card. After checking his trouser and jacket pockets, she found £7.39 in small change and his phone. She scrolled through some of his photographs, they were mostly boring stars and planets. However, there was one of Brian with his wife and kids, taken in front of a gigantic rocket.
Brian and the twins looked like dorks, but Eva was beautiful. Poppy’s throat tightened. She knew she wasn’t beautiful or nice or famous like Eva, but she had something that Eva would never have again, her youth. Her own flesh was smooth and tight, and men like Brian would pay heavily to touch it.
As she dressed, she composed a plan. She grabbed the little pencil and pad that the hotel provided and sat down at the desk to write.
Start going to lectures.
Prostitute self with more old men.
Seduce married lecturer, tell him after one month I’m pregnant.
Accept payments towards cost of baby.
Go on holiday to Thailand when baby nearly due (disguise bump from airline).
Have baby.
Sell baby.
Return from holiday in mourning.
Show photo of pretty deceased baby to all three lovers.
When she was dressed, and the flower had been put back behind her ear, Poppy took Brian’s phone and texted:
dear Brian I taken ur £ to buy baby
clothes and equipment. got to rush.
essay to write on Leonard Cohen.
his part in America’s post Vietnam
melancholia, let’s meet again sooner
than soonest. as the yanks say, missing
you already! love, your little Poppy. p.s.
taken ur card for taxi.
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.’