When it got dark a full bladder forced Eva out of bed and she changed from her day clothes into a pair of pyjamas that she had been keeping for emergency hospital admittance. This was on her mother’s advice. Her mother believed that if your dressing-gown, pyjamas and sponge bag were good quality, the nurses and doctors treated you better than the scruffs who came into hospital with their shoddy things in a Tesco carrier bag.
Eva got back into bed and wondered what her children were doing on their first night at University.
Chapter 2
Brianne was in the communal kitchen and lounge of the accommodation block. So far she had met a boy dressed like a girl and a woman dressed like a man. They were both talking about clubs and musicians she’d never heard of.
Brianne had a short attention span and had soon stopped listening but she nodded her head and said ‘Cool’ when it seemed appropriate. She was a tall girl with broad shoulders, long legs and big feet. Her face was mostly hidden behind a long straggly black fringe which she pushed out of her eyes only when she actually wanted to see something.
A waif-like girl in a leopard-print maxi dress and tan Ugg boots came in with a bulging bag from Holland & Barrett, which she stuffed into the fridge. Half her head had been shaved and a broken heart tattooed onto her scalp. The other half was a badly dyed lopsided green curtain.
Brianne said, ‘Amazing hair. Did you do it yourself?’
‘I got my brother to help me’, the girl said. ‘He’s a poofter.’
The girl’s sentences had a rising inflection as though she were permanently questioning the validity of other people’s statements.
Brianne said, ‘Are you Australian?’
‘God! No!’
Brianne said, ‘I’m Brianne.’
The girl said, ‘I’m Poppy. Brianne? I haven’t heard that before.’
‘My dad’s called Brian,’ said Brianne tonelessly. ‘Is it hard to walk in a maxi?’
‘No,’ said Poppy, ‘Try it on if you like. It might stretch to fit you.’
She pulled the maxi dress over her head and stood revealed in a wispy bra and knickers. They both looked as though they had been made from scarlet cobwebs. She seemed to have no inhibitions whatsoever. Brianne had many inhibitions. She hated everything about herself: face, neck, hair, shoulders, arms, hands, fingernails, belly, breasts, nipples, waist, hips, thighs, knees, calves, ankles, feet, toenails and voice.
She said, ‘I’ll try it on in my room.’
‘Your eyes are amazing,’ said Poppy.
‘Are they?’
‘Are you wearing green contacts?’ said Poppy. She stared into Brianne’s face and pushed the fringe away.
‘No.’
‘They’re an amazing green.’
‘Are they?’
‘Awesome.’
‘I need to lose some weight.’
‘Yeah, you do. I’m a weight-loss expert. I’ll teach you how to be sick after every meal.’
‘I don’t want to be bulimic.’
‘It was good enough for Lily Allen.’
‘I hate being sick.’
‘Isn’t it worth it to be thin? Remember the saying, “You can’t be too rich or too thin.”’
‘Who said that?’
‘I think it was Winnie Mandela.’
Poppy followed Brianne to her room, still in her underwear. They met Brian Junior in the corridor as he was locking the door to his room. He stared at Poppy and she stared back. He was the most beautiful man she had ever seen. She threw her arms above her head and affected a glamour-girl pose, hoping that Brian Junior would admire her C-cup breasts. He said under his breath, but loud enough to be heard, ‘Gross.’
Poppy said, ‘Gross? It would be really useful to me if you would elaborate. I need to know which bits of me are particularly repellent.’
Brian Junior shifted uncomfortably. Poppy walked up and down past him, did a twirl and rested one hand on a bony hip. She then looked at him expectantly but he did not speak. Instead he unlocked the door to his room and went back inside.
Poppy said, ‘He’s a baby. A rude, mindblowingly awesome-looking baby.’
Brianne said, ‘We’re both seventeen. We took our A levels early.’
Poppy said, ‘I would have taken mine early but I had a personal tragedy.’
She paused, waiting for Brianne to ask about the nature of the tragedy. When Brianne remained silent, she said, ‘I can’t talk about it. I still managed to get four A stars. Oxbridge wanted me. I went for an interview, but quite honestly I couldn’t live and study somewhere so old fashioned.’
Brianne said, ‘Where was your interview, Oxford or Cambridge?’
Poppy said, ‘Do you have auditory defects? I told you I was interviewed in Oxbridge.’
Brianne checked, ‘And you were offered a place to study at Oxbridge University? Remind me, where is Oxbridge?’
Brianne and Brian Junior had been to Oxford and Cambridge Universities and been offered places at both. The Beaver Twins’ small fame had gone before them. At Oxford they were given what looked like an impossibly difficult maths problem to solve. When both of them put down their pencils after seventeen minutes of frenzied workings out on the A4 paper supplied, the chair of the interviewing panel read their calculations as if they were a chapter of a racy novel. Brianne had meticulously, if unimaginatively, worked her way straight to the solution. Brian Junior had reached there by a more mysterious path. The panel declined to ask the twins about hobbies or pastimes. It was easy to tell that they did nothing outside of their chosen field.
After the twins had turned the offer down, Brianne explained that she and her brother would follow the famous professor of mathematics, Lenya Arovnikova, to Leeds. ‘Ah, Leeds,’ said the chairperson. ‘It has a remarkable mathematical faculty, world class. We tried to tempt the lovely Arovnikova here by offering her disgracefully extravagant inducements, but she emailed that she preferred to teach the children of the workers, an expression I have not heard since Brezhnev was in office, and was taking up the post of lecturer at Leeds University! Typically quixotic of her!’
Now, in the Hall of Residence, Brianne said, ‘I’d sooner try the dress on in private. I’m shy about my body.’
Poppy said, ‘No I’m coming in with you. I can help you.’
Brianne felt suffocated by Poppy. She did not want to let her inside her room. She did not want her as a friend, but despite her feelings she unlocked the door and let Poppy inside.
Brianne’s suitcase was open on the narrow bed. Poppy immediately began to unpack and put Brianne’s clothes and shoes away in the wardrobe. Brianne sat helplessly on the end of the bed, thinking that when Poppy had gone she would arrange her clothes to her own satisfaction. Poppy opened a jewellery box decorated in tiny pearlized shells and began to try on various pieces. She pulled out the silver bracelet with the three charms: a heart, a little house and a French poodle. ‘I’ll borrow this,’ said Poppy. Brianne made no objection, though she hated seeing her beloved bracelet dangling from Poppy’s thin wrist. The bracelet had been bought by Eva in late July to celebrate Brianne’s five A stars at A level. Brian Junior had already lost the cufflinks his mother had given him to commemorate his six A stars.
Brian Junior paced up and down in his shockingly tiny room. It took only three steps to move from the door to the window. He wondered why his mother had not rung as she had promised. He had unpacked earlier and everything had been neatly put away. His pens and pencils were lined up in colour order, starting with yellow and finishing with black. It was important to Brian Junior that a red pen came exactly at the centre of the line.
At ten o’clock Brian Senior came into the bedroom and started to get undressed. Eva closed her eyes. She heard his pyjama drawer open and close. She gave him a minute to climb into his pyjamas, then with her back turned to him she said, ‘Brian, I don’t want you to sleep in this bed tonight. Why don’t you sleep in Brian Junior’s room? It’s guaranteed to be clean, neat and unnatural
ly tidy.’
‘Are you feeling poorly?’ Brian asked. ‘Physically?’ he added.
‘No,’ she said, ‘I’m in good health.’
‘You’re distraught because the twins have left home.’
‘No, I’m glad to see the back of them.’
Brian’s voiced trembled with anger. ‘That’s a very wicked thing for a mother to say.’
Eva turned over and looked at him, ‘We made a pig’s ear of bringing them up,’ she said. ‘Brianne lets people walk all over her and Brian Junior panics if he has to talk to another human.’
Brian sat on the edge of the bed. ‘They’re sensitive children, I’ll give you that.’
‘Neurotic is the word,’ Eva said. "They spent their early years sitting inside a cardboard box for hours at a time.’
Brian said, ‘I didn’t know that! What were they doing?’
‘Just sitting there in silence,’ Eva replied. ‘Occasionally they would turn and look at each other. If I tried to take them out of the box they would bite and scratch. They wanted to be together in their own world.’
‘They’re gifted children.’
‘But are they happy, Brian? I can’t tell, I love them too much.’
Brian went to the door and stood there for a while as though he were about to say something more. Eva hoped that he wouldn’t make any kind of dramatic statement. She was already worn out by the strong emotion of the day. Brian opened his mouth, then evidently changed his mind, because he went out and closed the door quietly.
Eva sat up in bed, peeled the duvet away, and was shocked to see that she was still wearing her black high heels. She looked at her bedside table, which was crowded with almost identical pots and tubes of moisturizing cream. ‘I only need one,’ she thought. She chose the Chanel and threw the others one by one into the waste paper basket on the far side of the room. She was a good thrower. She had represented Leicester Girls High School in the javelin at the County Games. When her Classics teacher had congratulated her on setting the new school record, he had murmured, ‘You’re quite an Athena, Miss Brown-Bird. And by the way, you’re a smashing looking girl.’
She needed the lavatory. She was glad that she had persuaded Brian to knock through into the box room and create an en-suite bathroom and toilet. They were the last in their street of Edwardian semis to do so.
The Beavers’ house had been built in 1908. It stated so under the eaves. The Edwardian numbers were surrounded by a stone frieze of stylized ivy and sweet woodbine. There are a few house buyers who choose their next property for purely romantic reasons and Eva was such a person. Her father had smoked woodbine cigarettes and the green packet, decorated with wild woodbine, was a fixture of her childhood. Luckily, the house had been lived in by a modern-day Ebenezer Scrooge who had resisted the 1960s hysteria to modernize. It was intact, with spacious rooms, high ceilings, mouldings, fireplaces and solid oak doors.
Brian hated it. He wanted a ‘machine for living’. He imagined himself in a sleek white kitchen waiting by the espresso machine for his morning coffee. He did not want to live a mile from the city centre. He wanted a Corbusier-style glass-and-steel box with rural views and a big sky. He had explained to the estate agent that he was an astronomer and that his telescopes would not cope with light pollution. The estate agent had looked at Brian and Eva and was mystified as to how two such extremes of personality and taste could have married in the first place.
Eventually, Eva had informed Brian that she could not live in a minimalist modular system, far from street lighting, and that she had to live in a house. Brian had countered that he did not want to live in an old house in which people had died, with bed bugs, fleas, rats and mice. When he first viewed the Edwardian house he’d complained that he could feel a ‘century of dust clogging his lungs’.
Eva liked the fact that the house was opposite another road, and that through the large, handsome windows she could see the tall buildings of the city centre, and beyond that, woodland and the open countryside with hills in the far distance. Eventually, due to the extreme shortage of modernist living quarters in rural Leicestershire, they had bought the detached Edwardian villa at 15 Bowling Green Road, for £46,999. Brian and Eva took possession in April 1985 after three years of living with Yvonne, Brian’s mother. Eva had never regretted standing up to Brian and Yvonne about the house. It had been worth enduring the three weeks of sulking that followed.
When she turned the light on in the bathroom she was confronted by myriad images of herself. A thin, early-middle-aged woman with cropped blonde hair, high cheekbones and French-grey eyes. At her instruction, as she thought it would make the room appear larger, the builder had installed large mirrors on three sides of the room. Almost immediately she had wanted to tell him to take most of it away but hadn’t had the courage, so whenever she sat down on the loo she could see herself ad infinitum.
She removed her clothes and stepped into the shower, avoiding the mirrors. Her mother had said to her recently, ‘No wonder you’ve got no flesh on your bones, you never sit down. You even eat your dinner standing up.’ This was true. After she had served Brian, Brian Junior and Brianne she would go back into the kitchen and pick at the meat and vegetables in their respective saucepans and roasting tins. Anxiety about cooking a meal, taking it to the table on time, keeping it hot and hoping that the conversation around the table would not be too contentious, seemed to produce a surge of stomach acid that made food dull and tasteless.
The wire shelf unit in the corner of the shower was a jumble of shampoos, conditioners and shower gels. Eva spent a few moments selecting her favourites and threw the rejects into the bin next to the sink. She re-dressed quickly and put on her high-heeled court shoes. They gave her an extra three and a half inches in height, and she needed to feel powerful tonight. She strode around the room rehearsing what she was going to say to Brian when he next tried to get into her bed. She would have to act quickly, before she lost her nerve. She would bring up how he undermined her in public; the way he introduced her to his friends by saying, ‘And this is the Klingon.’ How he had bought her twenty-five pounds’ worth of lottery tickets for her last birthday. But then she thought about how quickly his bombast deflated, and how sad he had looked when she had asked him to sleep somewhere else. She stood near the bedroom door for a few moments, thinking through the consequences, then climbed back into bed, withdrawing from the potential battle.
She was startled awake at 3.15 a.m. by Brian screaming and fighting the duvet. His bedside light snapped on. When her eyes became accustomed to the light, she saw Brian stamping his foot on the carpet and holding his right calf.
‘Cramp?’ she said.
‘Not cramp. Your high heels. You’ve kicked a hole in my leg!’
‘You should have stayed in Brian Junior’s room and not come sneaking back into mine.’
Brian said, ‘Your room? It used to be ours.’
Brian was not good with pain or blood and here he was in the early hours of the morning, with both. He began to wail. When Eva had orientated herself she could see that there actually was a hole in his leg.
‘A lot of blood; wash the wound clean,’ he said. ‘You’ll have to bathe it with distilled water and iodine.’
Eva had no intention of leaving the bed. Instead, she reached over and plucked the bottle of Chanel No. 5 off her bedside table. She pointed the nozzle at Brian’s wound and pressed, keeping her finger on the spray mechanism. Brian squealed, hopped across the beige carpet and out of the door.
She had done the right thing, Eva thought, as she drifted back off to sleep. Everybody knows that Chanel No. 5 is a good antiseptic in an emergency.
At about four thirty Eva was woken again. Brian was limping around the bedroom shouting, ‘Ouch!’ at regular intervals. When she sat up, Brian said, ‘I phoned NHS Direct. They employ morons! Idiots! Plonkers! Fools! Half-wits! Ding-bats! Cretins! Hamburger-flippers! Pond-life!’
Eva said wearily, ‘Brian, please. Don’t you
get tired of fighting the world?’
He said, ‘No, I don’t much like the world.’
Eva felt a terrible pity for her husband as he stood at the end of the bed, naked, with a white linen napkin tied around one leg and with toast crumbs in his beard. Eva turned away from him. He was an intrusion in what was now her bedroom.
Sue Townsend
Sue Townsend was born in Leicester in 1946 and left school at 15 years of age. She married at 18, and by 23 was a single parent with three children. She worked in a variety of jobs including factory worker, shop assistant, and as a youth worker on adventure playgrounds. She wrote in secret for twenty years, eventually joining a writers’ group at the Phoenix Theatre, Leicester, in her thirties.
At the age of 35, she won the Thames Television Playwright Award for her first play, Womberang and started her writing career. Other plays followed including The Great Celestial Cow (1984), Ten Tiny Fingers, Nine Tiny Toes (1990), and most recently You, me and Wii (2010), but she has become most well-known for her series of books about Adrian Mole, which she originally began writing in 1975.
The first of these, The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole aged 13¾ was published in 1982 and was followed by The Growing Pains of Adrian Mole (1984). These two books made her the best-selling novelist of the 1980s. They have been followed by several more in the same series including Adrian Mole: The Wilderness Years (1993); Adrian Mole and the Weapons of Mass Destruction (2004); and most recently Adrian Mole: The Prostrate Years (2009). The books have been adapted for radio, television and theatre; the first being broadcast on radio in 1982. Townsend also wrote the screenplays for television adaptations of the first and second books, and Adrian Mole: The Cappuccino Years (published 1993, BBC television adaptation 2001).
Several of her books have been adapted for the stage, including The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole aged 13¾: the Play (1985), and The Queen and I: a Play with Songs (1994) which was performed by the Out of Joint Touring Company at the Vaudeville Theatre and toured Australia. The latter is based on another of her books, in which the Royal Family become deposed and take up residence on a council estate in Leicester. Other books include Rebuilding Coventry (1988) and Ghost Children (1997).