2009 - We Are All Made of Glue (2 page)

§

About an hour after the skip had gone, the doorbell rang. So soon! I stood frozen, paralysed by the enormity of what I’d done. I listened as the bell rang again, a long, persistent, I-know-you’re-in-there ring. No, best not to answer it. But what if he looked in through the window and saw me standing there? Maybe I should take my shoes off and silently sneak up to the bedroom. But what if he looked in through the letter box and saw me creeping up the stairs? What if he saw my silhouette in the window? I tiptoed into the corridor, lay down on the floor out of the sight line of any of the windows, and held my breath.

The doorbell rang again and again and again. Obviously he wasn’t fooled. Then the letter box clattered. Then silence. As I lay stretched out on the floor watching the light fade from the windows, I could feel my heartbeat slowing down and my breathing getting calmer. After a while, a song drifted into my head.

“
You thought I’d lay down and die. Oh no, not I! I will survive!
” Gloria Gaynor. It was one of Mum’s favourites. How did it go? “
At first I was afraid, I was petrified
.” I started to sing. “
I didn’t know if I could something something without you by my side…something change the locks
…
I will survive
.” I’d forgotten most of the other words, but I still knew the chorus,
I will survive! I will survive!
” I belted it out over and over again.

That’s how Ben found me when he got back from school, lying flat on my back in the corridor, singing at the top of my voice. He must have let himself in so quietly that I didn’t hear the door; then I looked up and saw his face looking down at me.

“Are you all right, Mum?” His eyes squinted with concern.

“Course I am, love. Just…enjoying a musical interlude.”

I clambered up from the floor and looked out of the window. The street was empty. It was raining again. There were no signs the skip had ever been there apart from a few shards of black vinyl on the road. Then I noticed a leaflet on the doormat. Ben picked it up curiously.
The Waichtower. Watch and pray for ye know not when the time is
.

“What’s this about?”

“It’s the Jehovah’s Witness magazine. It’s about the end of the world, when Jesus returns, and all the true believers get whisked up to heaven.”

“Hm.” He flicked through it, and to my surprise he stuck it in his pocket and clomped upstairs to his room.

What a shame. I could have done with a comforting heart-to-heart with some nice Jehovah’s Witnesses.

The doorbell rang again as Ben and I were about to sit down for tea. Ben answered it.

“Hi, Dad.”

“Hi, Ben. Is your mother in?”

Nowhere to hide this time. I had to face him across the table. Pectoral Pete was with him. They were both wearing their jogging gear. They must have run all the way over from Islington. I could smell the sweat on them. The whole kitchen reeked of pheromones, and I felt a mortifying stab of lust—my traitor hormones letting me down just when I thought I was beginning to get things under control.

Him: (Pulling back his chair and stretching his legs out as if he owned the place.) Hi, Georgie. I got your message. I’ve come to rescue my stuff.

Me: (Oh, help! What have I done?) It’s too late. They took the skip away this morning.

Him: (Eyes round and blinky. Mouth open in a little round O that makes him look like a hooked trout.) You’re kidding. (Yes, definitely more trouty than destiny-shaping. Ha ha!)

Me: Why would I be kidding? (His hair seems to have receded a bit, too. Good. He’s not as gorgeous as he thinks he is.)

Him: (Disbelieving.) They took the records? My great Russian composers?

Me: (A sly smirk.) Mmhm.

Him: (Even more disbelieving.) My first-fifteen rugby boots?

Me: All the junk. (How can a man who discards his loyal and devoted wife without a frisson of sentiment get all dewy-eyed about a pair of mouldy old football boots?)

Him: (World-weary sigh.) Why are you being so childish, Georgie?

§

Childish? Me? I picked up a plate of pasta. I could feel that twitching in my arm again. Pete was grinning with embarrassment, trying to bury his face in the
Guardian
. Then I caught the frightened look in Ben’s eyes—poor Ben, he didn’t need to see his parents behaving like this. I put the pasta down, bolted out of the room and ran up the stairs; I threw myself on to my bed, blinking the tears out of my eyes. I will survive. I will grow strong. I will change the locks. Look at Gloria Gaynor—she turned her heartbreak into a song that sold millions. As I sat there listening to the voices down below, and wishing I’d kept my cool, an appealing thought floated into my head. I can’t sing, but I can write.

In fact I was already halfway there. I had a working title and a terrific nom-de-plume. My mind lingered on a seductive image of myself as a published author, trendy in crumpled linen and a stylish leather bag full of proofs slung casually over my shoulder, jetting around the world with an entourage of poet toy boys. Rip would be revealed to the world as a self-obsessed workaholic, pitifully underendowed, with an insatiable Viagra habit and dandruff. His wife would be beautiful and long-suffering, with a fabulous bum.

“
Forget! Survive!
” Gloria Gaynor’s voice seemed to chide in my head. “
You’ll waste too many nights thinking how he did you wrong. Change the locks! Grow strong!
”

And to be fair, she had a point. My previous attempts at fiction, twelve and a half full exercise books, were stowed away in a drawer, along with a file of hoity-toity rejection slips.

Dear Ms Firestorm,

 

Thank you for sending
The Splattered Heart
for our consideration. Your book has some colourful characters and displays an impressive array of adjectives, but I regret to say I was unable to summon sufficient enthusiasm…

That sort of thing is bad for morale, and my morale was already low. But it was no use—a seed of optimism had lodged itself in my heart, and the opening lines were already sprouting in my head. There was one empty exercise book left.

It was past midnight when Hick rolled exhaustedly on to his broad,
muscular
slightly podgy back and casually ran his
powerful
fingers with their chewed-down fingernails through his thick curly,
naturally blond
discreetly highlighted hair
.

§

Okay, I know it’s not your Jane Austen. Maybe Ms Insufficient Enthusiasm had a point about the adjectives. I sat staring at the page. Had I developed writer’s block already? Downstairs I heard voices in the hall and the click of the latch. Then my bedroom door opened a crack.

“Are you all right, Mum? Aren’t you having any dinner?”

Shelflife

A
fter Rip moved into Pectoral Pete’s top-floor flat we agreed that Ben should spend half a week with each of us. One day I noticed him with his watch and his pencil ticking off the days on the calendar. Sunday, Monday, Tuesday: Dad. Wednesday, Thursday, Friday: Mum. Saturday—that’s the tricky one—one week with Dad, one week with Mum. We broke him in half and divided him between us. I could see the frown of concentration on his face as he tried to work out which week we were in. He was determined to be fair to both us.

As the rage against Rip congealed in my heart, I was sometimes taken over by a numbness so intense it felt like pain. On the days when Ben wasn’t here I found it almost unbearable to be in the house alone. The silence had an intrusive jangling quality, like a persistent tinnitus. When I walked from room to room I could hear my footsteps on the laminate floor. When I ate, I could hear the scraping of my knife and fork on the plate in the echoing kitchen. At first I tried having the radio on or playing music, but that made it worse: I knew the silence was there even though I couldn’t hear it.

When the silence got too much I’d take a walk, just to get out of the house. Wearing my comfy trodden-down trainers and an ancient brown duffel coat with a wide flapping hood and sleeves like bat’s wings, I flitted about at dusk, peeping through lighted windows into other people’s lives, catching them eating an evening meal, or sitting on a sofa watching TV, and tried to remember what it felt like to be still stuck together. Maybe I should have been prettying myself up and keeping my eye open for another man, but the wing-sleeves of the coat enfolded me like arms, and at that time, it was the only comfort I had. The look was not so much Bat Woman as batty-woman, but it didn’t matter because I never met anyone I knew, and anyway, the coat made me invisible.

§

One afternoon I went as far as Islington Green, thinking I’d get a few things I needed from Sainsbury’s and catch the bus back. It was about four o’clock, and the sticker lady was doing her end-of-day reductions. A crowd was milling around her like a piranha tank at feeding time. Mum had always been a great advocate of past-sell-by-date shopping, and I remembered with a twist of nostalgia how, when I was little, she used to send me scampering along the aisles looking out for the bright red REDUCED stickers that pouted like scarlet kisses on the cling film. She didn’t think much of Listernia and Saminella, and even an unpleasant experience with some mature crabstix didn’t dampen her enthusiasm. She would pat her elasticated middle. “Waste not, want not.” Mum always looked after her pennies as if they came from heaven. Funny how long after you leave home you still carry a bit of your parents around inside you. Now, without the certainty of Rip’s salary landing into our joint bank account with a generous kerchung! each month, I understood that sharp edge of insecurity that Mum must have felt all her life. Or maybe I was just so dejected at that time that I felt a queasy kinship with the out-of-date curled-at-the-corners pastries, the sad green-tinged chicken wings. Anyway, I pushed forward to join the crush.

The sticker lady was working incredibly slowly, spewing out labels that kept jamming the machine. No sooner had she stuck a new label on something than a hand reached out of the throng and grabbed it from her. The reduced items weren’t even reaching the shelf. I noticed it always seemed to be the same hand—a bony, gnarled, jewel-encrusted hand, darting out and snatching. Turning to follow it with my eyes, I spotted an old woman diving in low beneath the shoulders of two fat ladies. Her hair was tucked up into a jaunty Scotch plaid cap with a heart-and-arrow diamante brooch pinned on one side, and a straggle of black curls escaping under the brim. She was reaching and grabbing like a virago. It was Mrs Shapiro.

“Hello!” I called.

She looked up and stared at me for a moment. Then she recognised me.

“Georgine!” she cried. She pronounced in with hard ‘G’s and an ‘eh’ sound at the end. Gheorghineh! “Good afternoon, my darlink!”

“Good to see you, Mrs Shapiro.”

I leaned and gave her a peck on each cheek. In the enclosed space of the groceries aisle, her smell was ripe and farty like old cheese, with a faint hint of Chanel N°5. I could see the looks on the faces of the other shoppers as they backed away and let her through. They thought she was just a bag lady, a batty-woman. They didn’t know she collected books and listened to the great Russian composers.

“Plenty good bargains today, darlink!” Her voice was breathless with excitement. “One minute full price, next minute half price—same thing, no difference. Always tastes better when you pay less, isn’t it?”

“You should meet my mum. She always likes a bargain. She says it’s because of the war.”

I guessed she was a bit older than Mum—in her late seventies, maybe. More wrinkled, but more energetic. She was of the age when she should have been wearing those extra-wide-fitting bootees held on with Velcro, but in fact she was tottering about daintily on peep-toe high-heeled shoes like a lady of style, the grubby toes of her grey-white cotton ankle socks poking out in front.

“Not only the war, darlink. I heff learnt in my life to make the ends meet. A hard life is a good teacher, isn’t it?”

Her cheeks were flushed, her eyes focused and alert, her brow slightly furrowed with the effort of mental arithmetic as the new labels were stuck on top of the old.

“Come on, Georgine—you must grebbit!”

I squeezed in beside one of the big ladies and grabbed at a passing chicken korma, reduced from £2.99 to £1.49. Mum would have been proud of me.

“You heff to be quick! You like sossedge? Here!”

Mrs Shapiro snatched a pack of sausages reduced to 59p out of the hand of a bewildered pensioner, and tossed it into my basket.

“Oh…thanks.”

They looked unappetisingly pink. Seizing me by the wrist, she pulled me towards her and whispered in my ear, “Is okay. Jewish. No sossedge.” The pensioner was still staring at the sausages in my basket.

“You Jewish also, Georgine?” She must have noticed me eyeing the sausages with distate.

“No. Not Jewish. Yorkshire.”

“Ach, so. Never mind. Can’t help it.”

“Have you been playing the records, Mrs Shapiro? Are they all right? Not too scratched?”

“Great records. Glinka. Rimsky-Korsakov. Mussorgsky. Such a music. Take you straight up into heaven.” Her bony hands spread theatrically in the air, the rings glittering, the varnished fingernails bright like little bunches of cherries.

Close up I saw that the red highlights in her cheeks, which I’d mistaken for a flush of excitement, were actually two circles of rouge, one with a clear thumbprint in the middle.

“Shostakovich. Prokofiev. Myakovsky. My Arti has played with them all.”

“Who’s Arti?” I asked, but she was distracted by a 19p quiche Lorraine.

I didn’t like to admit that classical music wasn’t my thing—I always thought of it as Rip’s look-at-me-I’m-doing-the-hoovering music. I’m a Bruce Springsteen and Joan Armatrading fan myself.

“I don’t think I have much of an ear for music.”

Rip used to tease me that I was tone deaf and even my singing-in-the-bath efforts were painful to the cultivated ear.

“Not all great art is for the messes, darlink. But you would like to learn, would you?” She batted her azure eyelids. “I will play for you. You like the fish?”