She could smell the basil and tomatoes before he pushed the bedroom door open with his foot.
He placed the tray on her lap and stood by the bed, waiting for her approval.
She saw at once that the tomatoes had been cut thickly with a blunt knife, that the stalks were still on the basil and that it obviously hadn’t been washed. Despite her strict instruction not to add anything else, Brian had improvised a pattern around the edge of the plate with dried oregano.
She managed to contain herself, and when he asked, ‘All right?’ she answered, ‘My mouth is watering.’
She was truly grateful to him. She knew how difficult it was to run a household and keep down a full-time job.
And she suspected he was missing Titania.
26
It was six thirty in the morning. Hoar frost had decorated the trees and shrubs overnight, giving an ethereal glow to the Space Centre car park as Mrs Hordern approached. It was obvious to her by the positions of the randomly parked cars that something big had happened. Normally, each member of staff parked strictly in their designated places. In the past, there had been fist fights over trivial infringements of the Conditions of Use (which were displayed behind glass in a slender cabinet on top of a wooden stake in a far corner of the car park).
Mrs Hordern met Wayne Tonkin coming out of the Research Block as she was going in.
What’s up?’ she asked, nodding towards the car park.
Wayne said, ‘I hope you’ve not booked yer ‘olidays, Mrs Hordern, cos we’re all being burned to a crisp next week.’
What time?’
‘High noon,’ he said, making an effort to pronounce the aitch.
‘So, I needn’t bother buying a Christmas tree then?’ She gave a little laugh, expecting Wayne to join in.
‘No,’ said Wayne.
When Mrs Hordern went inside, she saw that the staff had come straight from their beds.
Leather Trousers was in a pair of pale-blue silk pyjamas. For once, he did not give her his Hollywood smile.
What’s goin’ on?’ she asked.
‘Nothing, nothing at all,’ he replied. ‘The earth is still turning.’
Mrs Hordern went into the staff cloakroom to hang her coat and change out of her boots into the Crocs she wore at work. She heard sobbing coming from a lavatory cubicle. She knew it was Titania because Dr Clever Clogs often went to the cloakroom to cry. Mrs Hordern knocked on the lavatory door and asked Titania if she could help in any way.
She was rebuffed when the door opened and Titania shouted, ‘I think not! Do you understand the Standard Model of particle physics and its place in the space—time continuum, Mrs Hordern?’
The cleaner admitted that she did not.
Well, butt out then! My problem is entirely related to my research, which I will now never complete. I’ve given my life to those particles!’
As Mrs Hordern walked the corridor, pushing the floor-washing machine in front of her, she thought, ‘Things are not right.’
When she passed the door labelled ‘Near-Earth Objects’, Brian Beaver burst out and shouted, ‘For Christ’s sake, turn that fucking machine off! We’re trying to think in here!’
Mrs Hordern said, ‘That may be so, but this floor’s not going to clean itself, is it? No need to swear. I won’t have it at home, and I’m not having it here!’
Brian retreated to his desk, where banks of computers were displaying rapidly scrolling numbers and a flashing red trajectory that intersected with a large spherical object. The room was crowded with people silently watching the screens. Several of his colleagues jostled closer and peered nervously over his shoulder as his fingers flew across the keyboard.
Leather Trousers said, ‘It might be good if you checked your Australian data again, Dr Beaver, before the eyes of the world are upon us. It’s kinda important that we get this right.’
Brian said, ‘I’m almost certain. But the computer models don’t all agree.’
‘Almost!’ bellowed Leather Trousers. ‘Do we wake the Prime Minister, the Secretary General of the United Nations and the President of the United States and tell them that we’re almost certain that the earth is fucked?’
Brian explained pedantically, ‘You don’t wake the President. The call will go to the NASA Political Liaison officer in Washington.’ Then he continued weakly, ‘It could be that the metadata from the star maps is corrupted. We’ve always known that our database integration was potentially suspect. And I trusted Dr Abbot’s interpolation techniques —’
Leather Trousers shouted, ‘And where is she when we need her? On fucking maternity leave up her precious Welsh mountain, suckling that moon-faced dribbler, with no landline, no mobile signal, and the most high-tech thing she’s got in that mould-filled hovel she calls a cottage is a fucking Dualit toaster! Get hold of the leek-muncher!’
Several hours later, when Mrs Hordern passed the office again with the electric polishing machine, she looked in warily through the half-open door and saw a small crowd of people laughing and shaking hands. The scene reminded her of Skippy, the television kangaroo, when he and his human friends had overcome their difficulties at the end of each episode.
Brian was sitting apart, with his hands linked together, staring down at the floor.
As Mrs Hordern left work, she passed Wayne Tonkin. He was polishing his new sit-on lawnmower.
He stopped and said, ‘So, the world ain’t finishin’ next week. Dickhead Beaver got his sums wrong. That asteroid’s gonna miss us by twenty-seven million miles.’
‘I was sort of looking forward to there being no Christmas,’ said Mrs Hordern. ‘It’s such hard work. No bugger lifts a finger in my house, ‘part from me.’
Wayne rolled his eyes and turned the lawnmower engine on. He was longing to use it, but the bastard weather wouldn’t let him for a few months yet.
27
Brian Junior and Brianne were not quite sure how Poppy came to be in their dad’s car when he drove them back from Leeds to Leicester for the Christmas holiday. Neither of them wanted her in the car, or in their house, and the prospect of spending four weeks with her appalled and horrified them both.
Poppy had been told that Brian was expected and she hung about in the lobby downstairs, waiting to introduce herself to him. She had overheard the twins laughing about their father’s abysmal dress sense — and she had seen a photograph she knew to be Dr Beaver, in which his face was lurking behind a straggling black beard — so she knew what to look for. Several likely candidates walked through the lobby before Dr Beaver appeared.
When Brian pressed the button to summon the groaning lift, Poppy slipped in beside him and said, ‘This lift’s awfully slow. I sometimes think that I’m in a Samuel Beckett play.’
Brian laughed. He had played Lucky in a student production of Waiting for Godot and had won praise for his ‘frenetic energy’.
While they slowly ascended to the sixth floor, Poppy told Brian that her parents were in a coma at Ninewells Hospital in Dundee. It was the first time she would be alone at Christmas, she told him.
Brian thought she might cry. His heart went out to her.
Poppy had a quick flash of memory. It was the Ninewells Hospital Wikipedia page. She gave him a big brave smile and said, ‘But Mum and Dad are lucky, in a way. They’re in the first Frank Gehry building in Britain. Bob Geldof opened it. I can’t wait to tell them.., when they wake up.’
‘Yeah, I like Gehry’s work,’ said Brian. ‘Very space age. It’s much like the module we intend to build, well, on the moon.’ When she asked him what he did for a living, he said, ‘I’m Dr Brian Beaver, I’m an astronomer. ‘Poppy squealed and clapped her hands together.
‘Wow!’ she said. ‘That’s what I want to be! What an amazing coincidence!’
Brian agreed, and said, ‘It is, indeed, amazing.’
Then she slapped her hand over her mouth and said, ‘OMG! You must be Brianne’s dad, he’s an astronomer!’
‘Guilty as cha
rged,’ said Brian. He thought Poppy was a sweetheart, enchanting, with her wild hair and pale skin. Her sinewy, exotic sexuality diverted him from asking any further questions about her unlikely astronomical aspirations.
‘So, what will you do for Christmas?’ he asked. ‘Where will you go?’
‘Oh, I’ll just stay here and go out for walks. I’ve no money. I’ve spent it all visiting Mum and Dad,’ she explained, wistfully.
There was a companionable silence for a moment.
‘So, you know Brianne?’
‘Know her? We’re the best of friends. I can’t bear the thought of being apart from her for four whole weeks.’
She smiled bravely, but Brian could see that the poor kid was crying inside. He didn’t take long to decide. When they got out of the lift, he told her to pack a bag and gave her his car keys.
‘When you’re ready, go and sit in the silver Peugeot Estate. It’ll be a fantastic surprise for the twins.’
Poppy fell on his neck, uttering thanks and other appreciative sounds that were not quite words.
Brian held her tight, laughing at first, but as she continued her iron grip around his neck he began to take notice of her young, firm flesh and the musky perfume she wore. He instructed himself to think about the gristly meat he had been forced to swallow at school dinners — it usually did the trick.
The twins travelled down in the lift, leaving their father to use Brian Junior’s en-suite lavatory in preparation for the hundred-mile journey back to Leicester.
Brianne said, ‘Four weeks without that crazy cow.’
Brian Junior smiled one of his rare smiles. Before the lift door opened, they unsuccessfully executed a high five.
Brianne said, ‘Brian Junior, you never get the timing right! How many have we practised? You must be hopeless in bed. You have absolutely no sense of rhythm.’
‘I had enough to impregnate Poppy.’
‘You can’t make a woman pregnant if you keep your underpants on and don’t get an erection.’
‘I know that! I also know that if you don’t let the sperm out, your balls explode.’
They left the warmth of the building and emerged into a confluence of harsh winds and snow flurries. They approached their father’s car and saw somebody sitting in the front passenger seat.
As they neared the car the front passenger door opened, and Poppy shouted, ‘Surprise!’
The journey was horrible.
The boot was full of Poppy’s suitcases and black bin liners bulging with her mad clothes and customised boots and shoes. Brianne and Brian Junior sat uncomfortably with their own luggage jammed in around them.
Poppy talked all the way from Leeds to Leicester. If he hadn’t been driving, Brian would have sat at her feet —as if she were Homer and wise beyond her years.
He thought, ‘She’s the daughter I should have had, a girl whose shoe size is smaller than mine. Who takes forever in the bathroom, titivating herself— unlike Brianne, who sounds like a grunting pig when she washes her face and is out of the bathroom in two minutes.’
Brian Junior thought about the tadpole baby inside Poppy’s womb. He couldn’t remember what had happened on the night she came into his bed. The images he summoned up were a tangle of arms and legs and heat and a fish-finger smell, the clash of teeth, of rapid breathing, and an unimaginably wonderful feeling of falling away out of his mortal body and into an unexpected universe.
Brianne wanted to rid the world of Poppy, and spent the journey planning in detail how it could be done.
As they turned off the motorway at junction 21 Brian tried to prepare the twins for the ‘changes in our domestic arrangements’.
He told them, ‘Mum’s been a bit off colour.’
‘Is that why she hasn’t phoned us for three months?’ said Brianne bitterly.
Poppy turned her head and said, ‘That’s shocking — a mother not ringing her children.’
Brian said, ‘You’re right, Poppy.’
Brian Junior said to Brianne, ‘We could have kept trying.’
28
Eva was longing to hold the twins in her arms, especially since she wouldn’t have to clean their rooms or put clean sheets on their beds, and somebody else would be responsible for their meals and buying their Christmas presents. And perhaps it was Brian’s turn to be irritated by their sloth and mess.
‘Yes,’ she thought. ‘Yes, let somebody else grovel under their beds and retrieve the cereal bowls with the dried-on milk and sugar, and the mugs and plates. The brown apple cores, dried banana peel and the dirty socks.’ She laughed out loud in her pure, white room.
Brianne and Brian Junior were shocked when they saw their mother sitting up in bed in the white box that used to be their parents’ bedroom. Eva held her arms wide open, and the twins shuffled into them.
She could not speak. She was overcome with the pleasure of holding them, of feeling their bodies — which had perceptibly changed in the three months since she had last seen them.
Brianne needed her hair cutting. Eva thought, ‘I’ll give her sixty quid, so she can go somewhere decent.’
Brian Junior was agitated — Eva could feel the tightening of his muscles — and unusually he had allowed several days’ worth of stubble to grow on his face, which she thought made him resemble a blond Orlando Bloom. However, Brianne’s black facial hair cried out for a waxing appointment.
They pulled away from her and sat awkwardly on the edge of the bed.
Eva said, ‘Well, tell me everything. Are you happy at Leeds?’
The twins looked at each other, and Brianne said, ‘We are, apart from —Eva heard somebody downstairs exclaim, ‘Wow, I already feel at home!’
The twins exchanged another look, and they got up and hurried out.
Brian shouted upstairs, ‘Twins, help me with this luggage!’
There was a thundering of footsteps on the stairs and landing, and then a strange-looking girl in a tatty cocktail dress, which she wore with an old man’s dressing gown, the cord of which she had wound around her head Gaddafi-style, threw herself into Eva’s arms. Eva patted her back and shoulders and noticed that the girl’s white bra straps were filthy.
‘Bob Geldof has been keeping a twenty-four-hour vigil at the side of my parents’ beds,’ announced the extraordinary girl.
Eva asked, ‘Why?’
‘You don’t know?’ the girl said. ‘I’m Poppy. I’m Brianne and Brian Junior’s best friend.’
Eva could hear Brian Junior and Brianne grunting as they staggered up the stairs with Poppy’s luggage, and was startled when Poppy shouted, ‘I hope that’s not my luggage you’re throwing about. There are precious objets d’art in those cases.’ She got up from Eva’s bed and went into the bathroom, where she left the door ajar.
A few seconds later, Eva heard Poppy’s one-sided conversation.
‘Hello, Peaches Ward, please.’
Silence.
‘Hello, is that Sister Cooke?’
Silence.
‘I’m very well. I’m staying with friends in the country.’
Silence.
‘How are Mum and Dad?’
Silence.
‘Oh no! Should I come up?’
Silence.
‘Are you sure? I could easily —’
Silence.
‘How long do you think they’ve got? Tell me, I need to know!’
Silence.
‘No! No! Not six weeks! I wanted them to be there when I graduated.’
Silence.
‘It breaks my heart when I think that this will be their last Christmas! [Pause] Thank you, Sister, but I only do what any loving daughter would do for her dying parents.’
Silence.
‘Yes, I wish I had the money to visit them over the Christmas holiday, but I am penniless, Sister. I’ve spent my money on rail fares and, er… grapes.’
Silence.
‘No, I am an only child and I have no living relations. My family were wiped out in the l
ast Chicken Flu epidemic. But, hey ho.’
Silence.
‘No, I’m not brave. If I were [sob] brave [sob], I wouldn’t be crying now.’
Eva slid down the pillows and pretended to be asleep. She heard Poppy come back into the bedroom, give a tut of annoyance and stomp out in her workman’s boots, which she wore without laces. The boots clumped down the stairs, out of the front door and into the street.
Brian, Brianne and Brian Junior were on the landing, discussing whose room they should take Poppy’s luggage to.
Brian Junior sounded uncharacteristically vehement. ‘Not mine, please, not mine.’
Brianne said, ‘You invited her, Dad. She ought to sleep in your room.
Brian said, ‘Things are bad between me and Mum. I’m sleeping in the shed, at Mum’s request.’
Brianne said, ‘Oh God! Are you getting a divorce?’
Brian Junior asked, at exactly the same time, ‘So, will we be buying two Christmas trees this year. Dad? One for us in the house, and one for you in the shed?’
Brian said, ‘Why are you wittering on about divorce and bloody Christmas trees? My heart is breaking as we speak here. But never mind about silly old Dad! Why should he enjoy the warmth and light of the house he’s still bloody paying for?’
He would have liked his children to give him a comforting hug. He remembered watching The Waltons on television, when he was young. His mother would be making up her face, preparing to go out with whoever was the latest ‘uncle’. Brian remembered the smell of her powder and how deft she was with the little brushes. The last scene, when the whole family said goodnight to each other, had always brought a lump to his throat.
But instead, Brianne said angrily, ‘So, where do we put the mad cow’s luggage?’
Brian said, ‘She’s your best pal, Brianne. I naturally assumed that she would sleep in your room.