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

biscuits.
He sighed as he placed the plate on the bedside table. The tea slopped over on
to the biscuits, but he didn’t appear to notice that they were quickly turning
to mush.
    Eva looked at him with new eyes, trying to imagine
him making love to the stranger called Titania. Would he use the same technique
he employed once a week with Eva — a bit of back stroking, nipple twirling —
would he mistake Titania’s inner labia for her clitoris, as he did Eva’s? Would
he shout ‘Come to Big Daddy!’ seconds before he ejaculated, as he always did
with her?
    Eva thought, ‘Thank you, Titania. I’m truly
grateful. I’ll never have to go through that weekly ordeal again.
    Why are you walking backwards, Brian?’ she laughed. ‘You
look as if you’ve just laid a wreath at the Cenotaph.’
    The answer to Eva’s question was that Brian no
longer felt safe to turn his back on her. She was no longer the compliant woman
he had married, and he feared her mockery — her two fingers gesturing behind
his back. He couldn’t allow that, especially not after his recent humiliation
at work when Mrs Hordern, the cleaner, had discovered Titania and himself engaged
in a sex act involving a model of the Large Hadron Collider.
    Brian said, ‘I’m glad you find it amusing. Haven’t
you noticed that my health is suffering? And, unbearably, my paper on Olympus
Mons has been discredited by Professor Lichtenstein. I’m on the edge, Eva.’
    ‘You look all right to me. Energetic, virile …
positively brimming with testosterone.’
    Brian looked at his wife. ‘Virile? I’m exhausted.
Why does housework take up so much time?’
    Eva said, ‘It’s not the housework that’s exhausting you.’
    They stared at each other.
    Eventually, Brian dropped his gaze and said, ‘I’ve
hardly been in the sheds.’ He carried on aggressively, ‘But I’m going now. The
ironing can wait.’ He stamped down the stairs and went out of the back door.
    The house had an unusually large garden. The original
owner, a Mr Tobias Harold Eddison, had taken advantage of his immediate
neighbours’ post-World War One financial difficulties and, over time, had
induced them to sell small parcels of land — until he had enough to plant a small
orchard, build a large ornamental fish pond and, unusual for the times, a
children’s tree house.
    Brian’s sheds were at the very bottom of the garden,
shielded by a row of holly trees which bore a heavy crop of red berries in the
winter months.
    Over the years Brian had built a model of the solar
system in his original shed, using reinforced drinking straws, ping-pong balls
and further assorted spherical objects, such as the fruit he had bought from
Leicester market and which had been given many coats of varnish until they were
rock hard. Jupiter had been a problem — but then, Jupiter’s huge dimensions
were always a problem. He had tried using a modified Space Hopper, cutting off
the horns, applying increasingly stronger patches, but Jupiter continued losing
atmospheric pressure — or, as the ordinary bloke in the street called it, air.
    Brian’s three-dimensional interpretation had been
slowly superseded by a network of computers and projection screens that
attempted to model the visible universe, but he often looked back fondly to
those nights when he had painted his planets to the accompaniment of Radio 4.
    At the Space Centre he was one of the masters of the
banks of mainframe computers and the encrypted information they held. But the
sheds were where his heart was. As the known universe expanded, so did Brian’s
mother shed, which was now connected to three slightly smaller sheds. Brian had
built doorways and corridors and laid an electricity cable from the house. And
four years ago, after complaints from Titania that she had hurt her back after
making love on a computer desk, Brian had bought two massive floor cushions —
pink for her, blue for him. These had also been superseded by a standard double
bed,