2009 - We Are All Made of Glue (11 page)

“Mm-mm. Can you hold the line a minute? (Eileen, what’s ‘er what does ‘ome visits?)”

Eileen’s voice, muffled by distance, said something that sounded like ‘Bad Eel’.

“She’s out on ‘er dinner,” I heard her say.

“You need to speak to Muz Bad Eel. I’m afraid she’s in a meeting. Can I take your number and ask her to call you back?”

Bad Eel. I pictured someone slim and slippery, with scarlet lipstick and a small silver gun tucked inside a frilly gaiter. I spent the whole morning at my desk, looking out of the window at the wind chasing stray leaves around the dank patch of lawn, and waiting for the Bad Eel to phone me back. I was supposed to be working on the press release Penny had sent about marine biological glues. Some company was developing a synthetic version of the glue that bivalves such as mussels and oysters use when they cling to the rocks. One of the strongest bonds in nature, apparently. They use fine thread-like tentacles called byssus, which are rich in phenolic hydroxyls. Phenolic hydroxyls: something about those words just turned my brain to glue. I started thinking about bivalves living down there in the dappled light, how they filter the algae from the water, how they close themselves up against the sea. It must be wonderful to be a bivalve, to be able to shut yourself away in your own mother-of-pearl-lined world, hanging on to the rock while the waves and tides churn outside. Ms Firestorm showed up to help me out.
Cloistered in their shimmering watery depths, the loyal bivalves cling passionately together
…Yes, we could learn a lot from bivalves. I realised I wasn’t very interested in commercial applications, and when the other elusive marine creature still hadn’t called by lunchtime, I wrapped up warm against the wind and set out for the hospital.

§

Mrs Shapiro was sitting in the day room when I arrived, wearing a pinafore-style hospital dressing gown tied at the back and a pair of woolly socks on her feet. I felt a pang of guilt. Probably it was my responsibility, as her next of kin, to bring in some suitable hospital gear for her. I’d have to remember for next time.

A tattered magazine was open on her knee, but she wasn’t reading; she seemed to be engaged in a fractious and incoherent argument with another old lady sitting beside her.

“But ‘er were on this ward when she shouldn’t of been,” the old lady was saying vehemently, “and new sister said it weren’t ‘er business anyway.”

“Well, if they was no longer there someone must heff tooken them.”

“No, because she weren’t supposed to be. That’s what I’m sayin’ to yer.”

She looked up and saw me in the doorway.

“That’s ‘er there. Ask ‘er.”

Mrs Shapiro turned, and stretched out her hands to me.

“Georgine, you got to get me out of here. All this people is mad.”

“She’s talkin’ tripe,” said the old lady, and heaving herself up out of the chair she minced off along the ward, muttering aloud.

“What’s going on?” I asked.

“She is a bonker,” said Mrs Shapiro. “Brain been amputated.”

The old lady stopped, turned, flicked two fingers at us, and carried on.

“How are you doing, Mrs Shapiro?” I pulled up a chair beside her. “I thought you’d be going home by now.”

“I am not going nowhere,” said Mrs Shapiro. “They say I must go into the oldie-house. I tell them I am not going nowhere.”

She folded her arms determinedly across the front of the green dressing gown. The argument with the old lady was obviously just a warm-up for a much bigger argument to come.

There was a new sister on duty, a young girl who looked hardly older than Ben.

“What’s happened with the home assessment?” I asked.

“The report’s just come through. They’re recommending residential care. I’m afraid she’s not very happy about it.”

“I really don’t see why she needs residential care. She was managing fine.”

“Yes, but you know, once they start falling, they can very easily lose their confidence. Especially at her age.”

She brushed a stray hair off her face and looked over her shoulder towards the nurses’ station. I could see there were a dozen things she needed to be doing more urgently than talking to me.

“What if she refuses to go?”

“We can’t discharge her into an unsafe situation.”

“So she just stays here?”

“She can’t stay here. She’s blocking an emergency bed that someone else could use.”

“So what are the options?”

“Look, I think you’d better talk to Mrs Goodney. The social work office is over by physio.”

I went back to sit with Mrs Shapiro. “It’s okay,” I said. “I’ll get them to do another assessment.”

“Thenk you, darlink,” she said, gripping my hands. “Thenk you very much. And my dear cats, how are they?”

“They’re fine. But Wonder Boy seems to be killing a lot of birds.”

“Ach, poor darlink, he is upset. You must bring him here. Next time. You promise, Georgine?”

I mumbled something evasive, but just then the tea lady appeared with the trolley.

“You heff no krautertee?” said Mrs Shapiro grumpily. “Okay, I tek this horse’s piss. No milk. Three sugar.”

Cradling her cup in her hands, she settled back on the pillows.

“Now, Georgine, your running-away husband. You heffn’t finished telling me.”

“I did tell you. It was so boring you fell asleep.”

She caught my eye and gave a little laugh.

“You told me about your parents. That was quite boring, isn’t it? But what about the husband. He was a good man? You were happy in loff?”

“We were happy at first. But then…I don’t know…He got absorbed in his work. I had babies. Two—a girl and a boy. And a miscarriage in between. Then I started writing a book.”

After the miscarriage I’d given up my job and started freelancing. Rip had taken his articles but found the solicitor’s work tedious and applied for a job in the northern office of a national charity. He was keen and committed, out and about all over the place, so one of us had to be home-based. The freelancing didn’t fit easily around children so, inspired by my earlier introduction to Mum’s preferred reading matter, I decided to try my hand at romantic fiction. I got a couple of short stories published in a women’s magazine and after that encouraging start I plugged away at a romantic novel—it was about a plucky young heroine who is inexorably drawn to a grand but gloomy house inhabited by a handsome, moody, extremely rich poet (I know, but it
is
fiction) who falls in love with her but alas dies of a mysterious ailment on the eve of their wedding, which is terribly tragic, but then she falls in love with the local schoolteacher who lives in a cute rose-covered cottage and is penniless but has a good sense of humour and is great in bed.

I thought I’d got the genre spot-on, and it grieved me that no one wanted to publish it. I tried changing the font, changing the ink colour, I changed my nom de plume, but the rejection slips just kept coming.

“
Splettered Heart
. This is a good title for a book, Georgine. Powerful.”

“Thank you. Rip thought it was too melodramatic.”

“Ach! He is a man. What does he know?”

“He thought I should call it
The Shattered Heart
or
The Broken Heart
, but I thought that was a bit cliched.”

“Exactly so. And it has been published?”

“No. Not yet.”

“But you must not give it up.”

“I’m completely rewriting it. A new version. But it’s hard to find the time. I’ve got another job now, writing for online trade magazines.”

“Lane tred? What is this?”

“It’s a group—
Adhesives in the Modern World, Ceramics in the Modern World, Prefabrication in the Modern World
, things like that. I work on all of them, but mainly
Adhesives
. I’ve been doing it for about nine years.”

“But this is fascinating!”

“Well, it’s just for the building trade. It’s not exactly world shattering.”

“Too much shattering is going on nowadays, Georgine. Building is much better.”

Nathan had conducted a cursory interview over the telephone, during the course of which he’d asked me, among other things, what my favourite pudding was (Bakewell), whether I’d ever been to Prague (no), and which team I supported (Kippax Killers, of course), and told me after five minutes that I was just the person he was looking for.

“Glue,” he’d said. “Don’t worry, it’ll grow on you.”

Romantic it wasn’t, but it paid the bills, and it meant I could be at home for the kids. Strangely enough, it did grow on me.

“So that’s my story so far. Not very exciting, really.”

“Well, we will heff to see if we can make you a happy ending.” She raised her teacup. “To happy endings!”

On my way home from the hospital, I dropped in at Canaan House to feed the cats and do a quick tidy-up in case the Bad Eel should deign to visit. The wind was still blustering, swirling up dead leaves and litter on the pavement. Wrapping my coat tight around me, I turned into Totley Place. At once I saw there was something unusual there—something brightly coloured at the entrance to the cobbled lane that led up to Canaan House. As I drew closer my heart began to beat with rage and trepidation. Yes, it really was what I’d suspected, half hidden there among the creepers—a large green-and-orange For Sale sign, with the name written in bold black letters: Wolfe & Diabello.

It was stuck into the ground beside the wall. I grabbed the post and heaved. It held firm, so I pushed and pulled it backwards and forwards, to loosen it up. Then I got round behind it, scrambling through a climbing dog rose that clung to the wall. Surely Mr Diabello hadn’t done this, the thorns picking at his Italian-styled suit? It must have been some strong-arm minion in a white van, hammering the post into the ground with a mallet. I’d worked myself up into a frenzy, but still it wouldn’t budge. If anyone had seen me, they’d have thought I’d gone mad. I grabbed the post in both hands, arched my back and bent my knees for one last heave. It slid out of the ground as smoothly as a knife out of butter. I slid with it, staggered, lost my balance, and fell backwards into the rose bush. A thorn jagged my cheek. Wonder Boy appeared howling out of the undergrowth. It started to rain.

§

I’d been all fired up to storm into the Wolfe & Diabello office and demand an explanation, but I called in at home to pick up my raincoat, and the phone was ringing as I opened the door. It was Rip.

“Hi, Georgie, I just wanted to have a quick word about Christmas.”

I steeled myself. “Fire ahead.”

“I wondered if you’d made any plans?”

“Not really. Why? Have you?” I felt a quiver of dread—Christmas: the time when families are supposed to be together. Would I be able to survive a Christmas on my own?

“I was wondering about going up to Holtham with Ben and Stella…”

“Fine.” Actually I felt like drowning myself in a tub of lukewarm piss, but I managed to put on a brave show of nonchalance. “Do that. Fine by me.”

“What about you?”

“I haven’t really thought about it.”

After he’d put the phone down, I went up to my bedroom, flung myself down on the bed, and let the tears flood into my eyes. I sobbed and sobbed until my chest ached and my shoulders heaved and my nose ran with snot—I sobbed for my broken marriage and my broken family, all the hurts and humiliations I’d ever endured in life, my ailing parents, my absent brother, my too-far-away daughter, the general sorrows of humankind, starving babies in Africa, kids who self-mutilate, suicide bombers and their victims, they all came washing saltily in on the same vast relentless indivisible tide of human misery. I thought about the bivalves, the curved pearly walls inside their shells, the greenish light filtered through seawater; whatever the extraordinary glue was that enabled them to hold so tight while the storms swirled around them, that’s what I needed now.

No job too small

B
y next day, the fight had gone out of me a bit, but I decided to walk across to Wolfe & Diabello anyway. I needed to clear my head, and I still had a couple of bones to pick with them. It was another raw, blustery December day, the sky teeming with grey scurrying clouds. I pulled my hood up, and put my head down into the wind, and maybe that’s why I didn’t see it until I almost stumbled across it—a post lying across the pavement. Attached to the post was a For Sale sign. Not Wolfe & Diabello, but Hendricks & Wilson. That was odd—it had been windy in the night, but not
that
windy. Even odder—as I turned the comer, there was another one, stuck into a hedge, a few hundred metres up the road. Then further along, I spotted another lying in a skip.

There was no one in the Wolfe & Diabello office when I went in. I opened and closed the door again, making it ‘ping’, but still nothing happened. The third time I did it, Suzi Brentwood emerged from a door at the back; I thought I spotted a shifty look flit across her face before her professional smile composed itself.

“Hello, Mrs…How may I help you?”

“My aunty is thinking of selling her house before Christmas,” I said very loudly.

As if by magic, the door at the back of the office opened, and Mr Diabello appeared.

He was wearing the same dark stylish suit, a clean freshly folded handkerchief peeping out of the breast pocket.

“Hello, Mrs Sinclair. What can we do for you?”

“The For Sale sign in the garden at Canaan House—you put it there?”

He smiled, that irresistible cheek-creasing smile.

“We have to keep one step ahead of the competition.”

“What do you mean?”

“We heard on the grapevine that Hendricks had sent a valuer in.”

It must have been Damian, I thought. But how did he get in?

“No harm in that, Mrs Sinclair. It’s a free market. Shop around. See who can offer you the best deal. But, you know, I felt after our chat the other day that you deserve a—how can I put it?—a more focused view of the service we offer here at Wolfe & Diabello.” His eyes smouldered with dark fire. His quizzical eyebrows quizzed.

Ms Firestorm popped up briefly to take a look, and she was well impressed. “Deserve. Focused. Service.” She repeated the words slowly in her head. They sounded deeply sexy. But they still didn’t make sense.