Flying Under Bridges Read online

  And he would smile at me and say, ‘How’s my lovely Eve? How’s Daddy’s girl?’

  I still miss him. The smell of his jumper. The feel of his arms around me. He played the piano and sometimes Mother would stand in the door with a dishcloth and stop for a second to listen. It was the only time she was quiet. I thought things were perfect till he died. I thought I understood how he and Mum worked. I don’t know if you knew but Dad passed away at the end of February last year. It was near the end of March when we went to Mum’s for the will reading. I’m sure everyone thought it would just be straightforward, but it wasn’t. It was a terrible day. Partly because of the will and partly because Adam caught his willie in his trouser zip. I don’t think he and I were ever the same again after that.

  Adam’s Defective Trouser Department

  … you wives, be submissive to your husbands…

  (1 PETER 3.1)

  I remember we were late leaving for the lunch but I could hear Adam was in a terrible state.

  ‘Eve! Eve!’ he screamed from the bedroom in anguish that could only be life-threatening. I was busy in the bathroom. I’d been having a few problems, bleeding and that, but Adam was calling, so I patched myself up quickly and sprayed sprays of different kinds to hide any possible smell. It’s a worry for women, isn’t it? Smell. Anyway, I hid my secret pads and bits in the under-sink cupboard. Adam never looks in that cupboard. It holds the risk of cleaning things. Then I ran to our room. Adam was standing in the middle of the bedroom with tears streaming down his cheeks. His face was all twisted with pain. I thought he’d had a heart attack.

  I ran to the phone. ‘I’ll get the doctor.’

  ‘No!’ he squeaked. ‘You can’t!’

  ‘Why ever not?’

  Adam could hardly speak. ‘It’s caught.’ He moaned through a sort of coughing sound, and indeed it was caught. The very edge of Adam’s ‘little friend’ had caught in the zip of his trousers. I always think it’s a very odd part of the male body. Funny little dangly thing with a will of its own. I haven’t said that to anyone else. Maybe these are the crazy things. It was not a time for me to think such thoughts. This was very serious. If we did not remove our little friend from his trap, it was quite possible the house might fall down.

  ‘It needs cream,’ I said.

  ‘You can’t touch it!’ he screamed through clenched teeth.

  ‘Lie down,’ I said, and went to get the Oil of Ulay. Adam lay face-up on the bed and I gently wiped on cream with some cotton wool. The middle of the morning — what would people think? It was a very slow operation but we managed to secure freedom. The lesion left behind was tiny but devastating. Little lamb. He could hardly walk.

  We sat looking at his penis with great reverence. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d seen it in daylight. Poor thing looked rather tired. I’ve never written the word penis before. Penis. Sounds much tidier than the real thing. Do you remember Miss Cadman, English Lang and Lit, fifth year? It took her a whole term to tell us that a ‘pity’ in art was a nude. We all thought she was going to faint dead away when you made her explain what it meant. Penis. Pity. Don’t tell Shirley all this. It isn’t necessary. I don’t think children want to know that their parents have genitalia at all, let alone bits which they’ve injured. I wondered if we couldn’t have insured against damage to the thing? We had insurance for everything else.

  ‘Do you think it’s serious?’ Adam asked, as he examined the wound thoroughly.

  ‘No’ I said, aware that I was bleeding again. Gushing and seeping.

  ‘You mustn’t tell anyone,’ he kept saying through. clenched teeth. Who was I going to tell? We were going to lunch with Mother.

  News, Mother? Well, Adam caught his privates in his zip this morning. I know, fifty-five! You’d think he would have got the hang of it by now.

  We went to have coffee in the kitchen. He thought it would calm him down. Despite his pain, Adam tutted as I picked up the newspapers from the hall table. He thinks it is a new extravagance on my part that I have the Guardian delivered as well as the Daily Mail. I tell him I don’t want the Daily Mail. I want to see what’s happening in the world.

  ‘There’s no point in reading all that foreign news because there’s nothing we can do about it,’ he says. Adam mostly likes the local paper and cuts out long bits about planting your onions out early. ‘You should stop worrying about something that is none of your business and concentrate on things you can do. Like the garden,’ he said, while I poured the coffee. He was right. I shouldn’t be sitting there. Not while there was fruit to be removed from under the hall radiator.

  We settled down. He flicked through the Mail while I read my paper. I remember because that’s what always happened.

  ‘There’s a Japanese cult in the paper who say there’s going to be Armageddon in September,’ I’d say, and he’d reply, because he wasn’t listening, ‘I don’t think we’re doing anything in September.’

  Then Adam chuckled to himself and stabbed a finger at his tabloid. ‘This is good,’ he said. ‘This is very good. They’ve got this photo of a Filipino man who’s been caught eating his dead partner’s hand. What do you think the headline is?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said.

  Adam could hardly tell me for laughing. ‘What Are You Doing for the Rest of Your Wife? Isn’t that great?’ He looked disappointed at my reaction. ‘I thought you’d like it. It’s foreign news.’

  I looked at him, my husband.

  ‘Adam, do you love me?’

  ‘What? Don’t be silly. What’s brought this on? Don’t I look after you? Give you a nice home?’

  And he does. He has stood by me. He came to visit me here and we both pretended nothing had really happened. We pretended that someone will realise the car was terribly faulty and it couldn’t possibly have been anything to do with me.

  I went back to my paper. They only have the rubbish ones in here so I have nothing else to read. I don’t know if I mind. I am beginning to wonder what the point of all the news is. I mean, it floods into our houses day after day and none of us do anything about it. What is the point in knowing if we’re just going to carry on the same as usual anyway? Did you know that the Turkish government is doing horrid things to the Kurds? I saw a programme on it and I kept thinking, What should I do about this? What can I do? These people might join the Common Market.

  I used to watch the television news in the kitchen. Adam bought me a portable for my birthday. I know he wanted it for gardening programmes, but Dixons happened to be running a special offer the week of my birthday so it rather fitted in.

  Fact — the first real television station was built in Berlin in 1935 in anticipation of the Olympic Games where Hitler behaved so beautifully. The BBC did the first live journalistic reporting in 1937 for the coronation of King George VI. Imagine living in an age when seeing royalty on the telly was a rarity. The smallest video screen available is less than one inch across — about the size of a postage stamp. It’s called Private Eye and was dreamed up by some American called Allen Becker. Apparently you have to hold it really close to your eye to watch. Tricky if you want friends round to watch Wimbledon.

  I think Adam thought a telly in the kitchen would keep me quiet at night. I don’t sleep, you see. Not properly. Haven’t for ages. It’s the dreams. They won’t leave me alone. I think it mainly started when Shirley was born. I used to lie awake with her cot right next to my head, listening to her every move and willing her to breathe till morning.

  Sorry, I got distracted. They like to keep us busy in here. I’ve been for another ‘session’. Big Nose, the psychiatrist, and I have been discussing the ‘reasons for my crime’. Apparently, he says, it is good that I’ve never done it before. I can’t think why. I mean, I never had the chance before. The barrister says that it is good that I am ‘intelligent, articulate and personable’. Middle class seems good too, although she doesn’t say so. I think that comes as a given under ‘articulate’. The psychiatrist i
s rather more cheerful today. Rather more confident that we can find an excusing mental condition for my aberrant behaviour. I imagine it would be nice to render me harmless with some pathological excuse.

  The Temptation of the Sunday Supplements

  Thou has set our inequities before thee, our

  secret sins in the light of thy countenance.

  (PSALMS 90.8)

  I have made the barrister, Miss March, less confident.

  ‘Before that.., day…’ We both know which day she means. I nod conspiratorially as she lowers her voice to a whisper. ‘Had you ever done anything which you, yourself, might consider to be… wicked?’

  I lean forward to match her and lower my voice. ‘Well…’ She can hardly bear the suspense. Sits tapping her mobile phone on the desk.

  ‘Yes,’ I finally say. The pause has been worthwhile. She almost drops the phone. I’m being mean and it’s not right. It’s only that everyone is watching me all the time. I wish they would get it all over with. I am quite happy to say I did it but it seems that won’t do.

  ‘I see,’ she says, with a rough clearing of her throat. She is faced with a serially bad person. ‘And what was the nature of these offences?’

  ‘Oh, I didn’t say they were offences. Just a bit wicked. That’s what you said — something wicked.’ She clears her throat again. It makes me almost maternal.

  ‘Would you like a fruit gum?’ She shakes her head so I pick up my tapestry and begin sewing. I think I seem calm but I’m not really. I have terrible flashes of feeling quite sick. I don’t know how things got to here. It’s not where I belong. It’s not how things should have turned out and I have been wicked before. Not big things. Just stupid things because everything was always the same. Because nothing ever changed.

  I was born in 1955. I was a teenager in the sixties, I was heading for grown up in the seventies. Everything was supposed to have changed since my mother had me. Since she regretted everything about her life and me. I went to school with a lot of girls with plans. We all had plans and then when I had my children I met my friends again. I met them in the same playground where my mother had waited. I met them waiting for their children. Regretting. You see, nothing had changed. It was all talk. But I didn’t regret. Not till the very end.

  The lawyer starts tapping again. Maybe she thought we were getting somewhere. ‘What sort of wicked things?’

  ‘Oh nothing, just daft really. I started sending off for ads. You know, from the newspapers, Sunday magazines, that sort of thing. There’s quite a lot in the Sunday Telegraph. Well, I had started reading all the papers and then I noticed all these ads —shoes for the wider fitting, stair-lifts for the terraced home, trousers with elasticised waists in non-crease man-made fibres, holidays for the elderly-but-active sun-seeker, nylon sofa covers and snuggle bags for wet dogs in the back of saloon cars. The first one happened because I was cross about the charity shop. I filled in Betty Hoddle’s name and address on a coupon for incontinence pants in a range of autumn colours and sent it off. After that I started sending all sorts of things to people in the town. Plastic drain cover brochures, sonic pest repellents, anything really, although I did try to match the item to the person I was sending it to.’

  ‘And what was their reaction?’

  ‘Well, I’ve no idea. I mean, no one knew it was me. It seemed rather harmless in the great scheme of things. I suppose it was irresponsible but it’s not like I took to drink or anything.’

  ‘Had you been drinking at the time of the… incident?’

  ‘No. Not at all.’

  ‘That’s good.’

  ‘Yes.’

  Everyone is very pleased that I hadn’t been drinking. That would have made the killing very unladylike, which would have been even worse. A man killing someone while he was drunk might have used it as a defence, but for a woman it painted her as even more satanic. That’s what the girls on my wing tell me. They’re really very nice for criminals. I had not been drinking, but the fact is I have been wicked. It is a bad thing. It fuzzes the lines between whether the jury will vote for me or not. I have been naughty. Miss March has been clear with me.

  ‘But you had been violent before.

  ‘I don’t think so.’

  Miss March looks at her notes. ‘I have here that one evening in your parents’ house you knocked your sister out with a blow to the head.’

  ‘I can explain. She wanted me to. You see—’

  ‘The fact remains, Mrs Marshall, that the world is divided into two types of female defendant — those who merit compassion and those who don’t. It is very important that we get the jury on your side. These incidents will not help. Now would you say that you were good at your job?’

  ‘I didn’t have a job. I was a housewife.’

  ‘Yes, but were you good at it? You understand the probation officers will go and see what sort of house you maintained.’

  ‘I maintained?’

  ‘Yes. How your family will or will not cope without you has an important bearing on the final judgment or the sentence you might expect.’

  Quick, Ladies and Gentlemen of the Jury, you must return me to the bosom of my family or they may burst with germs. I try to think about my house. It seems very far away. Was I good at running it? Did I maintain a nice home? We never ran out of toilet paper and I put blue air-fresheners down all the drains. Would that save me staying in jail? Did anyone value it? Certainly not Adam or Shirley. Neither one of them would have seen running the house as ‘a complex task requiring high levels of management skills’. If Adam had done it things would have been different. The house would have been filled with little plaques for Employee of the Month with his name all over them.

  Fact — the Stoics believed that disciples, who were often from very wealthy families, needed to do menial work before they learnt anything. They taught that until a person had learnt to bear physical hardships and the social embarrassment of doing a slave’s labours, they couldn’t acquire wisdom. I must be very ready for learning.

  I look at Miss March. She is young. She has made it. I am merely a rung on her case ladder to success. Why didn’t I become a barrister? I wasn’t stupid at school. Why did I sit at home for so long feeling the hairs on my chin? Why did it take so long for me to wonder what I was for? To want to know why I had come?

  In my house I could see out of the kitchen window from my chair at the breakfast bar. If I had the chair just right I could see out and watch the television at the same time. Our house is on a new estate. The Much Sought-After Palmer Estate with its Convenient Shopping Facilities. So convenient, in fact, that I could see them at the end of the road. From one chair I could take in my entire horizon — the house, the shops and the TV. There are eight houses on the way and inside each one sat a housewife, sipping coffee. We didn’t get together much, any of us. Too much to do. Hypnotised by the fear of lingering odours in the fridge or unwanted pet hairs on the hall carpet. The estate has moulded miniature gardens. We were like those little pockets of air in bubble-wrap — separated into claustrophobic isolation.

  I kept a small mirror on the breakfast bar for my chin work. Almost every day there seemed to be a new hair that had sprouted. I pulled them out with a very fine pair of tweezers I kept just for the purpose. I went through a lot of tweezers before I found the right ones. I got them out of Adam’s Swiss Army knife. I didn’t tell him, but it is a loss that we discussed for some time. The hairs are tough and when you pull them out there is a great, fat, white root on them that was buried in my chin. I hold them up to the light from the window and examine them. They are sturdy things. Dandelions of the face that will not be eradicated no matter how often you weed them away. I sometimes wonder if it wouldn’t be best just to let them have their head, so to speak. Just let them grow and see what kind of facial growth I could achieve. I quite fancy a twirling moustache.

  ‘Aha!’ I would cry with a flourish of handlebar hair. ‘It is time to conquer the germs, to annihilate the enemies of
hygiene.’ I stand with my gun hand ready on the trigger of a disinfectant spray. ‘You cannot hide from me. I am not alone. I have a robot army of machines, oceans of water and detergent and an array of technicians who, with a single phone call, will leap to my aid.’

  I rush to the bathroom ready to destroy. My moustaches flail in the air. I raise the lid of the toilet and cry, ‘You cannot escape. Incoming at nine o’clock. Brrrrrr!’ The droning of an attack in full flight departs my lips as I dare to approach that most sinister of places — under the rim of the toilet bowl. I spray and death comes.

  It’s just like that. Then, when at last it is time for coffee, I know that I can rest. My cupboards are neat and orderly. My jellies are ranked in colour order. I can find a small tin of baked beans with my eyes shut and then… I start again because I do not want to think.

  ‘The housewife who must wait for the success of world revolution for her liberty might be excused for losing hope.’ Germaine Greer. Bloody Germaine Greer. Hadn’t she got something better to do than fill people’s heads with rubbish? If I’d never joined those classes none of this might have happened.

  The barrister leafs through her notes. ‘Your husband says things had started to slip before.., the incident.’

  ‘He does?’

  ‘Yes. He says he found… rotting fruit under the radiators…’

  Fact — the plum is part of the rose family. The plum tree flower has an enlarged basal portion called the pistil. The pistil is the ovary of the fruit. The outer part of the ovary ripens into a fleshy, juicy exterior, making up the edible part, and a hard interior, called the stone or pit. The seed is enclosed within the stone. According to the earliest writings in which the plum is mentioned, the species is at least 2,000 years old. Ancient writings connect early cultivation of these plums with the region around Damascus.