Flying Under Bridges Read online

  ‘Indeed. Well. This is going to be a very exciting time for you, Inge. We have great plans. I think I speak for the entire corporation when I say that you are one of the most loved and trusted faces here at the Beeb and we are going to move you up and up. Now, Nick has got some very exciting ideas. Nick?’ Paul clicked his fingers to wake Nick up from his reverie. ‘The show . .

  Nick! Tell her about the show.’

  ‘Yes.’ Nick cleared his throat and gave a small cough. ‘We, Paul, obviously, and I, have come up with an idea for you to host a brand-new Saturday-night show called…’ he paused for effect, ‘Don’t Even Go There!’

  Paul beamed, Nick beamed, Trish came in and served the wine. Everyone was thrilled.

  ‘Isn’t that a great title? I just love the title,’ boomed Paul.

  ‘Great title,’ echoed Trish the mouse.

  ‘Chardonnay?’ enquired Paul. ‘It’s a lovely little oak-smoked—’

  ‘No, thanks.’ Inge waited for Trish to go back outside. ‘Great. It’s a great title. What’s it about?’

  Paul picked up a sheaf of papers and started leafing through them.

  ‘According to our Audience Approval Ratings, we thought about.., seven o’clock for half an hour.’

  Inge shook her head. ‘Sorry, the idea, for the show.’

  Nick blinked and Paul swallowed some wine.

  ‘Obviously it’s not finalised but… Nick?’ Paul looked to his trusted deputy.

  ‘Yes, well, it’s a panel game with you hosting and other famous sporting personalities competing in two teams—’

  ‘Like A Question of Sport? I mean, that’s been done. Sue was brilliant.’

  ‘Same sort of set but totally different concept. Obviously that was sports people answering, you know, questions about sport. This will be different.’

  ‘How?’ persisted Inge, still reeling from the Wimbledon announcement. None of this was what she had expected from the meeting. Nothing was what she expected any more.

  ‘Well, obviously the actual content of the show is in development.’ Nick faltered for a moment but then rallied with an idea. ‘But I did think of one section called Sports Balls, where we find footage of famous sportsmen who fall or whatever and show their, you know, balls, except because it’s seven o’clock and family and that, we block that bit out and the audience will all say—’

  ‘Don’t even go there!’ Inge finished the sentence for him.

  Paul and Nick nodded and drank some more wine. Paul smiled at her. ‘I knew you’d like it. I think we’re looking at a catch-phrase for the nation. The public will love it. They love you.’

  That was the day Inge learnt that the corporation had no more sport for their most famous sports presenter to present. Everything was going to have to change. It should have been all right. Inge was famous. Everyone knew Inge Holbrook. She probably should have known better than to move back to Edenford.

  Chapter Three

  It’s when you go to the supermarket that you see the true triumph of women’s liberation. Each out-of-town superstore is packed with women leading full and satisfying lives. These are the women who have achieved the serenity of motherhood, the satisfaction of a creative career and the ability to achieve orgasm during the spin cycle of one of their many efficient household appliances. Women who know how to fondle a melon into ripeness, a child into slumber and a man into ecstasy. Is it true? Wander down any aisle and find out.

  While Inge’s career was being loved and going ‘up, up, up’, her old school friend Eve Marshall was doing the weekly shop at the giant out-of-town supermarket. She looked like any of the other countless women who had pulled up in their Ford Fiestas and their Vauxhall Cavaliers to replenish their food stores and sustain their loved ones. Slightly overweight, slightly unfit, slightly distracted. Minimal make-up, maximum perma-press. These are the women who aren’t supposed to exist any more. They were supposed to have woken to the clarion call of liberation given in the 1960s and 1970s and reached out to fulfil themselves. Instead, these women had stolidly followed in their mothers’ silent footsteps. The women knocking on the glass ceilings of corporate affairs might find it hard to imagine these suburban lives, but they are still being lived. Some with more equanimity than others.

  The wire shopping trolleys stood waiting in serried ranks next to the homeless man selling the Big Issue. He had been rather popular when he’d first started. Many of the women had found paying 50p a convenient way to feel they had dealt with the homeless but, annoyingly, the man kept coming back. No one had said anything, but there was a quiet consensus amongst the shoppers that he was pushing his luck. Surely he had been there long enough to have found a home by now? How many 50ps could it take, for goodness’ sake? In quiet disapproval at the vendor’s persistent life on the street, most of the women shoppers had stopped buying the paper. Now the thing had gone up to £1 and that had really overstepped the mark. One could feel sympathetic but there was a limit. Even Cancer Research only came out with their collecting tins one day a year, and cancer was something anybody could get. Even, annoyingly, well-off people with private health care.

  Eve wasn’t shunning anyone. She just didn’t see the homeless man. She didn’t see anybody. She was trying not to think about shopping. Actually, she was trying not to think. She had recently decided that thinking did her no good at all so she was trying to shut down her brain, but something always sent it whirring off again. A woman in front of her was pulling at a trolley that clung to its metal colleagues, desperate not to be put to work.

  ‘Dreadful, aren’t they?’ Eve said brightly to the struggling woman. ‘Did you know that the shopping trolley was invented in Oklahoma City in 1937 by the owner of the Humpty Dumpty Store? Oh yes. The first ones were made out of folding chairs. The feet were put on wheels, then there was a basket on the seat and you pushed the whole thing with the back.’ Eve’s audience was unimpressed. Eve smiled. ‘Had to be invented by a man, don’t you think? I’ve got a book called Facts You Didn’t Know,’ she called, as the woman salvaged her trolley and disappeared into the shop.

  Eve sighed. What a useless piece of information. Facts You Didn’t Know and Didn’t Care About. She eyed the wheeled basket selection. She had a theory about shopping trolleys. There had been a time when she thought they all had one wonky wheel, but then she had decided that would be an odd thing to invent. Lately she had concluded it was personal. There was just one defective trolley and she always chose it. Eve moved slowly towards one of the carts and then darted to another by surprise to see if that made a difference. She moved off towards the automatic doors and her trolley lurched and tripped over its inevitably faulty wheel.

  The place was full of two types of women: those with lists and those without. Those with had their heads down and were busy efficiency shopping around the acres of sustenance. Those without had arrived in the hope of inspiration. That the Muse de Manger, St Creuset, might suddenly appear over the wet-fish counter. Eve was listless in every sense. She couldn’t be bothered to write a list any more and she could hardly bring herself to drag round the aisles. She hated shopping. She passed the flowers and moved into the fruit and veg. The supermarket had provided a paradise of fresh produce to lure her into the bowels of the shop. Here was freshness, here was goodness, here was that just-picked wonder of Mother Nature, which her family cried out for. Eve supposed she ought to buy some but she resented it.

  ‘The lure of the lemon and the call of the kiwi fruit drag us ignorant women in to buy fresh things, which rot in a bowl on the dining-room table, and tinned things, which don’t. They think we are stupid and it will make us buy more. We are and it does.’ Eve spoke to herself in her head. It was a new habit. She had so much to say and no one much to say it to.

  She looked at the fresh herbs and the exotica. A large sign asked her ‘Why not do something successful with a star fruit?’

  It was an impossible question to answer, so Eve moved on. There was a special on plums. A woman with scream
ing twins in her trolley jammed the aisle ahead. The poor woman was trying everything to quieten her shrieking pair of babies. She waved rubber toys, made curious noises with her teeth, shook the trolley in a gentle sway, but the babies just screamed. The woman was at a complete loss. Eve looked at the babies. Perhaps they weren’t the woman’s children at all. Perhaps, as there were two of them, they were some special offer she had picked up at the front. Buy one, get one free. Eve couldn’t get past, so she picked up some of the plums beside her and put them in her trolley.

  From where she stood, Eve could survey the lie of the land. She knew it would not be a good day. In an attempt to add to the joy of the supermarket experience, the powers in charge had moved everything.

  ‘Look everyone, here’s something fun — Bakewell tarts are now in the crisps section!’

  Once she was released from Fresh Produce, Eve moved methodically up and down the aisles until she reached Household Goods. Whoever was in charge of this section had made something of an effort. A display of tin foil had been rather artistically laid out to encourage people to cook turkey out of season. Fans of foil were splayed out to look like metallic Christmas birds on a bright, orange board. Eve had stood for some time in front of Paper Goods trying to decide whether 100 per cent recycled toilet tissue was more or less environmentally friendly than Sustainable Forest paper, when she suddenly looked up and caught sight of herself in the fold of a foil bird. She was frowning and all she could think was that what really needed recycling was herself.

  It was sort of shocking. Life-changing moments ought to be big, cataclysmic affairs, things that shake and change the shape of your world, but if your life is already made up of minutiae then perhaps the big change arrives with a tiny herald. All that happened was a glance at the arse of a bird made of kitchen wrap, but Eve could hardly get her breath. She saw herself, really saw herself, for the first time in years. It was not some glance in the morning mirror to see if she absolutely had to wash her hair. It was a long look in a distorting display and she knew suddenly that she looked old and fat. She looked like somebody’s mother. In that instant, that insignificant instant, Eve suddenly wanted out of her own life. She walked on in a haze of discontent and depression.

  The vicar, Reverend Davies, was in Frozen Food, rummaging through the veg section. The man had rather an unfortunate harelip, so no one could have been the least bit surprised to see him selecting washed and peeled carrots for his tea.

  ‘Ah, the lovely Mrs Marshall,’ he beamed, clutching a dripping bag of orange rabbit food. Reverend Davies’s top lip was hardly there at all. His mouth seemed to be entirely made up of bottom lip and huge front teeth. The effect was to create something of a spray when he spoke. The Lord loved him but not enough to provide orthodontic work.

  ‘The flowerth are looking lovely in the north aisle. I alwayth thay there’th nothing tho thummer-like ath thunflowerth in theathon.’ Water dripped from the carrots and from the end of Eve’s nose. She always forgot not to stand too close when the Reverend came up with a sentence containing a lot of Ss. Later she would think that perhaps she should have paid more attention to Reverend Davies. This was God’s envoy. This was her passport to Paradise. Perhaps he could have helped her. The pastor of St Mary the Virgin of Edenford. Unfortunate name for a church, she always thought. Made it sound as if Edenford had just the one virgin.

  ‘Thee you for the Thummer Thocial?’ he enquired, with a fresh gush of saliva. Maybe it was a test from God and Eve failed. She nodded her answer and moved on to drip dry amongst the custard tarts and bottled waters. Eve didn’t know why she did the flowers at the church. Reverend Davies came round one day for jumble and she didn’t have any so she ended up doing the flowers instead. She wasn’t a churchgoer at all, but Eve liked arranging the large bunches. She liked cutting the fat stems of new flowers so that the sap ran down on the wrapping paper. She liked watching the green stems dive into the clean water in the tall vases.

  The shopping trolley dragged Eve from one zigzag to another, finally leaving her jammed against a display of foreign goods. She had selected nothing for any meal whatsoever. Just the special-offer-near-at-hand plums. In a dump-bin by the till the Lords of Food were trying to shift starter kits for Mexican food, so Eve bought one of those and left.

  The cat was waiting when Eve got home. It hid behind the hat stand in the hall watching her unload the bags. There was no love lost between Eve and that cat. Adam had bought it for her one Christmas. He never asked Eve if she wanted a cat or, indeed, what she thought about cats in general, because it was meant to be a surprise. It certainly was. Eve didn’t like cats at all. They seemed to her snooty creatures and somehow the cat, Claudette, seemed to know this. It bided its time. Eve was just bringing in the last lot of perishables when it pounced. For a moggy it had exceptional athletic ability. From behind the hat stand Claudette flew into the air and landed in the middle of Eve’s shoulders. Eve dropped the shopping and the box of plums spilled out over the floor. Claudette clung on for a good minute and Eve could have sworn she heard her laughing. Then for no reason whatsoever the cat just dropped to the floor and buggered off. She did it all the time. Never when anyone was watching. Just when Eve was alone.

  Plums. Plums everywhere. The one product Eve had bought to show how fresh and healthy her life was. She bent down and gathered up the bright red fruit, but there was one stuck under the radiator and Eve couldn’t get to it. Eve couldn’t get to it partly because it had rolled too far under and partly because of Tom’s stuffed otter.

  Eve’s son, Tom, dabbled in taxidermy and the stuffed-animal presence of his hobby was felt throughout much of the house. He had left the otter there to dry one winter and never collected the thing. It was an odd creature, captured in a moment of whatever makes an otter insane with delight. It had been stuffed to sit up on its hind legs with a smile to make a dentist moist with pleasure. It sat grinning at Eve while she lay on the floor with a knitting needle and tried to poke the plum out. At last she managed to jab the Houdini of the fruit basket with the end of the needle and the point came out all red. Like it was bleeding. Eve had been bleeding a lot recently. Most days she was preoccupied with either going to or coming from ‘sorting myself out’. She had seen the doctor. He had told her ‘something must be done’, but she didn’t want to go again. She couldn’t bear the indignity of it. The flat on your back trying to ‘relax’ of it.

  ‘If you had a hysterectomy, Mrs Marshall, then it would all be over,’ the doctor said, as if he could possibly know anything about it.

  Why do so many men go into gynaecology? What leads a young man to a life up to his elbows in vaginas? It would all be over if she had the operation. They would vacuum out Eve’s functions and it would all be over, but she just couldn’t. She just couldn’t and she didn’t know why.

  ‘It’s a very common operation,’ continued the doctor. ‘Why, in America a third of all women have had their wombs removed by the time they are sixty.’

  Eve looked at the man who was dealing with her mysterious body. He stood there, confident that he alone could untangle Eve’s defective structure. His white coat merely hid his blue tights and red underpants. He was able to cure the uncurable. Stop a woman seeping in a single bound. A professional ready to lance her body as if it were an abscess.

  Eve never discussed it with Adam. She knew he wouldn’t like the actual word. Womb. He couldn’t bear anything to do with women’s problems. It was bad enough that he lived in monthly terror that she might discharge something on the sheets at night. Constant bleeding would be intolerable. Eve was unclean.

  She lay on the floor looking at the plum blood. She thought of her face reflected in the foil and it occurred to her not to get up at all, but she would have been too easy a target for Claudette so she rose and went to the loo. These were big daily decisions. This was Eve’s life.

  Chapter Four

  4 January

  Holloway Prison for Women

  London


  My dear Inge,

  And Lillian and Derek begat Eve

  It is not the old that are wise, nor the

  aged that understand what is right

  (JOB 3.9)

  Thank you so much for your letter and the photograph of the flat. It looks lovely. All that Caribbean sun. It’s funny. I always wanted Shirley to travel. I just didn’t think it would be like this. I don’t know why she went with you. I don’t suppose any of us knows why anything happened, but thank you. I know you’ll look after her.

  The psychiatrist wants to know about my childhood. He keeps saying that there has to be an explanation. It’s what we all want, isn’t it? We don’t like things we don’t understand. I think that’s why people have religion. To get rid of the uncertainty of everything. Something bizarre happens and people nod and say, ‘Well, God moves in mysterious ways,’ and that’s that sorted out. I have an explanation for what happened but I’m sure it won’t do, so the shrink and I relentlessly seek out an answer. I don’t know what it is he wants — a bad nappy change when I was four or a difficult relationship with tricycles or something. There just has to be some blame. What happened has to be somebody or something’s fault.

  ‘Were you happy as a child?’

  And I think about that and the answer is — yes. Very. Mum and Dad were the happiest couple in our street. He was so gentle, my dad. Do you remember him? Never said a word against anyone. He was a builder. A good builder. An unusual builder because everyone loved him.

  ‘Please, Mr Cameron, we’re desperate. You’re the only one we can rely on.’

  Cameron Builders and Decorators, which sounded like an army but it was just him. He built and decorated all day and then came home and did the same for Mother. The garden was stunning. He used to work in it all weekend and Mother would come out and say, ‘What have you put the azaleas there for? They can’t go there.’