Free The Woman Who Went to Bed for a Year by Sue Townsend Page B

adult filling in a
bloody dot-to-dot book. Madness is relative.’
    Yvonne snapped, ‘Well, none of my relatives are mad.’
    Eva couldn’t be bothered to respond, she was weary and
wanted to sleep. It was exhausting, listening and talking to Yvonne — who, it
seemed to Eva, wilfully misinterpreted most conversations, and lived from one
grudge to another. Yvonne was proud of her straight-talking, though other
people had described her as ‘obnoxious’, ‘unnecessarily rude’ and ‘a total pain
in the arse’.
    Eva said, ‘You know how much you value
straight-talking?’
    Yvonne nodded.
    ‘I’ve got something to ask you … it’s difficult
for me …’
    Yvonne said, encouragingly, ‘Come on then, cough it up.’
    ‘I can’t use the en suite any more. I can’t put my
feet on the floor. And I was wondering if you would help to get rid of my
waste.’
    Yvonne paused, computing the information, then gave
a shark’s smile and said, Are you asking me, Eva Beaver, to dispose of
your wee-wee and poopy? Me? Who’s fastidious about such things? Who gets
through a giant bottle of Domestos a week?’
    Eva said, ‘OK. I asked, and you said no.’
    Yvonne said, ‘I warned Brian not to marry you. I
foresaw all this. I saw at once that you were neurotic. I remember when you
and Brian took me on holiday to Crete and you would sit on the beach wrapped in
a big towel, because you had “issues” with your body.’
    Eva flushed. She was tempted to tell Yvonne that her
son had been sleeping with another woman for the last eight years, but she was
too weary to manage the aftermath. ‘You were very cruel to me after the twins
were born, Yvonne. You used to laugh at my stomach and say, “It looks like a
Chivers jelly.”‘
    Yvonne said, ‘Do you know what your problem is, Eva?
You can’t take a joke.’ She picked up the dot-to-dot book and the pen. ‘I’m
going downstairs to clean your kitchen. The salmonella must be rife in there.
Rife! My son deserves better than you.
    When she’d gone, Eva felt as though the furniture
were crowding in on her. She pulled the duvet over her head and was comforted.
    She thought, ‘No sense of humour? Why would I want
to join in laughing when Brian and his mother find it hilarious that somebody
has suffered an accident or misfortune? Should I have laughed when Brian
introduced me by saying, ‘And this is the trouble and strife — she spends my money,
but she’s mine for life.’
    She was glad that her mother-in-law had refused her
request. The thought of Yvonne criticising the colour and texture of her stools
was intolerable. Eva felt that she’d had a very narrow escape. She started to
laugh until the duvet fell away from her and slid on to the floor.
     
    That
night, Eva dreamed that she saw Cinderella running down a red carpet, hurrying
back to the pumpkin coach. As she woke, she imagined that the carpet was white
and led from her bed to the bathroom. Within a second the carpet had turned
into Eva’s pure-white bed sheet, folded and draped and transformed into a rippling
pathway which led from her bed to the adjoining bathroom. If she kept her feet
on the white pathway she could, she thought, with a leap of imagination, still
be in bed.
    She knelt on the bed and pulled the bottom sheet
free, threw it on to the carpet and then brought the sides of the sheet
together, tucking the ends under the mattress. She stepped out and, working
carefully, brought the edges together with a series of narrow folds until the
sheet was ridged, like an expensive crisp.
    The cotton pathway was a foot or so short of the
toilet. Eva pulled a white towel from the rail in the bathroom, folded it and
laid it down as an extension.
    She felt that if she stayed on the sheet she would
be safe — though from what, she didn’t know.
    When she had finished on the toilet, she leaned
across to the washbasin and washed her body down with warm water. After
cleaning her teeth she emptied then refilled the basin and