2009 - We Are All Made of Glue (30 page)

What would it have been like, I wondered, to grow up on custard made with eggs and vanilla and nutmeg, instead of Bird’s powder and oven chips? Would I have been a different kind of person, more articulate and witty? Would I have had a high-powered career, or a string of best-selling novels? Would my husband not have left me? The trouble is, I was bonded to Rip; cyanoacrylate; a permanent bond. He was the only man I’d really loved, and however much I raged against him I knew I would never love anyone in that way again. I felt tears brimming into my eyes. Nathan slipped his arm around me and gave me a friendly squeeze.

“Glue can be messy stuff.”

I rested my head on his shoulder, which was at just the right height if I bent my knees a bit, and let the tears roll down the sides of my nose, big and warm. Nathan didn’t say anything. He just stood there and let me cry. After a while I pulled a crumpled ball of tissue out of my pocket and dabbed my eyes.

“Nathan, there’s something I’d like to ask you.”

“Fire ahead.”

“Would you mind, on the way home, driving more slowly?”

Uses ofsuperglue

I
woke up next day feeling full of life. It was late—almost nine o’clock, and intermittent bursts of sunshine were pushing in beneath the elastic of the black knickers. The crying yesterday had refreshed me, like the rain in the night, and so much exposure to the possibilities of glue had fired me up with new enthusiasm for my work. Sitting up in bed I switched my laptop on. The article I was working on was about medical uses of adhesives. Cyanoacrylate (superglue) had been used effectively in emergency battlefield situations in Vietnam to hold wounds together until they could be sutured properly. Now a number of companies were trying to develop specialist adhesives to be used in place of suture. Human bonding. There were two technical problems, it seemed, to be overcome. One, how to get the sides to hold together for long enough for bonding to take place. Two, how to achieve separation without tearing the flesh.

Then I remembered. Cyanoacrylate AXP-36C. I fumbled in the bedside drawer for a scrap of paper to write it down on before I forgot. I tried to picture Rip’s face when he realised he was stuck. I tried to picture his bottom, the agony of tearing flesh as he tried to free himself. Who would rescue him? Who would call the ambulance? Ottoline Walker? Or would it be me? Would I laugh? Would I minister gently to his adhered behind? So many possibilities!

I put aside medical uses of adhesives, just for a moment, and opened my exercise book.

One evening, as the Sinster family
wore was
were sitting down to their sumptuous
tea dinner
evening meal in the vast candle-lit dining hall surrounded by deer’s’ antlers and other dead things
they heard
the
plangent pungent poignant
melodious twanging tinkling twinkling (oh, sod this) sound of a mandolin assayttailled their eager ears and a moment later a tall dark handsome figure clad eftfy (clad only—what was I thinking of!) in a swirling velvet cloak strode into the hall. After he had finished his performance Mrs Sinster threw him a few coins from her silk purse and said, “Oh, Mr Mandolin Player, please come again. I am fascinated by yourlaf§e mandolin-charming folk culture
.”

§

Poor Mrs Sinclair—was I being a bit unfair? When I’d first met the Sinclairs, their world had seemed so alien and intimidating—governed by unspoken rules and veiled assumptions—but she had really tried to make me feel at home, had inducted me kindly into the arcane mysteries of napkin rings and the
Daily Telegraph
crossword, and I suppose I must have seemed a sullen and ungracious daughter-in-law. At the time, it had irked me that they appeared to have no idea how privileged their lives were. It had irked me the way Mr Sinclair asked, in a hushed voice, whether I’d really met Arthur Scargill; I’m no great fan of the comb-over king, but the way the Sinclairs went on, you’d think he was the Antichrist himself.

It had taken me a long time to realise that the Sinclairs were probably as scared of me as I was of them. Okay, it can’t have helped that on my third visit to Holtham I’d worn a large yellow badge with ‘
The enemy within
in bold letters. They must have seen me as an outrider of a sinister army bent on destroying order, decency,
Horse & Hound
, and everything else they held dear. It wasn’t long after the end of the miners’ strike, and I thought they needed shaking up a bit—well, that’s my excuse. Rip had tried to persuade me to take it off, but when I insisted, had stuck up for me valiantly and tried to explain to his bewildered parents what it was about.

“But if it’s supposed to be a
secret
enemy, I can’t understand why she’s wearing a badge,” I overheard Mrs Sinclair whispering to Rip.

Yes, perhaps I was being a bit hard on Rip, too. But all’s fair in love and fiction. I pressed on.

Surprised in a compromising position with the mandolin player, Gina is expelled from Holty Towers. She protests that it was only a response to Rick’s philandering, and determines to seek revenge by glueing his bottom to a toilet seat. The secret is to match the right adhesive to the adherends. Hurray! That would mean another visit to B&Q (strictly for research, of course.) The trouble is, I couldn’t help feeling a touch of sympathy for Rick. After all, he was just a weak and deluded male—easily led by the cunning spotty Spanish maid—he couldn’t really help it. And Gina should have known better than to get involved with that dubious mandolin player. Something else was bothering me. I tried to focus on the image of Rip’s bottom in the toilet seat, but the other photo from the glue exhibition kept intruding, the little girl, her screwed-up eyes as she tried to pull her hands apart; her scream.

Hauling myself out of bed, I stood at the window and looked down over the garden, stretching my arms above my head and waggling my shoulders, which were still stiff from the cold and tension of yesterday’s car journey. The ground was wet, and the leaves on the laurel bush were
dazzling
with captive raindrops, but the sun kept coming in and out behind the rain clouds, casting fleeting rainbows across the sky. At the far end of the garden, a haze of mauve crocuses had spread, almost overnight. Birds were hard at work, hopping about in pairs with bunches of grass in their beaks.

Then I spotted Wonder Boy slinking along the edge of the fence, making his stealthy way towards the blackbird couples. I banged on the window and they flew away. Wonder Boy looked up and gave me a long reproachful stare. I felt a pang of guilt. Okay, a visit to Mrs Shapiro was long overdue, I wanted to say to him, but it wasn’t exactly easy, was it? The
HELP ME
letter Mrs Shapiro had sent was on my bedside table—I’d just scribbled the glue code on it. As I looked at the envelope with its scrawled-out name and address, I had a brainwave.

The adhesion consultant

A
fter lunch, I dressed myself up in a red jacket that had belonged to Stella—1 had to leave the buttons undone—and a glittery Oxfam scarf, and pulled a woolly hat down low over my hair. I put on bright red lipstick and an old pair of sunglasses by way of disguise—and made my way to the bus stop on the Balls Pond Road. Though in fact when I arrived at Northmere House I saw that my disguise was redundant, for there was a different guard-dog lady at the reception desk.

“Can I help you?”she barked.

“I’ve come to see Mrs Lillian Brown.”

She consulted her list. “Are you family?”

“A cousin. Once removed.” Well, I could have been.

“Would you sign in please? Room twenty-three.”

She pressed the button that opened the sliding door. And in I went—into the muted realm of the pink carpet, the sickly chemical air, the rows of closed doors from behind which, from time to time, a television blared eerily. On the other side of the corridor was the long plate-glass sliding door which gave on to the courtyard with its square of grass and four benches, now all damp with rain. A demented bleeper sounded constantly in the background, reminding the absent staff that behind one of these closed doors, someone desperately needed help.

I knocked on the door of number twenty-three. There was no reply so I pushed it open. The room was small and overheated, with a terrible deathly smell. A massive television set, volume on at full blast, dominated the room, so it took me a moment to notice the tiny figure lying motionless on the bed.

“Mrs Brown?”

There was no reply. I shouted louder, “Mrs Brown? Lillian?”

I tiptoed over to the bed. She was lying there with her eyes closed. Her hand, I saw, was clutched round the bleeper on its cable. I couldn’t tell whether she was breathing.

I backed out and let the door close behind me. My chest was thumping. A fat woman in a pink corporate uniform was coming down the corridor.

“In here,” I said.

“Are you Mrs Brown’s niece?” She seemed to be unaware of the bleeping alarm.

“Actually, I’m…”

“I hope you’re not smuggling cigarettes.” She scrutinised me fiercely.

“Oh, no. Nothing like that.”

“Because last home I worked at, someone give an old lady a fag and some matches, and it all went up in flames.”

“Oh, dear. Was anyone hurt?”

“We was saved by a dog.”

“Really?”

“A mongrel,” she snorted. “And then they tried to smuggle in a gearbox.”

“A gearbox? What for?”

“Beats me. Anyhow, matron got rid of it. Said it weren’t hygienic.” Her face softened for a moment. “It were a shame really, poor old man. Still, ‘e got ‘is revenge.” She chortled. “Anyhow, we don’t allow that sort of thing in ‘ere. We got rules.”

“Er…I think this lady needs some help…”

But she’d already vanished up the corridor. As I watched the door close behind her, I noticed there was now someone sitting out on one of the benches in the courtyard in the rain, a solitary hunched figure wearing a powder-blue dressing gown and matching peep-toe slippers, puffing away at a cigarette. It was the bonker lady.

I banged on the window and waved. She looked up and waved back. But when I slid open the door and went out to join her in the courtyard, she put on a sulky face.

“You never brought me cigs.”

“I did,” I lied. “You weren’t there.”

She sniffed as though she knew it wasn’t true.

“Are yer lookin’ for ‘er? Yer pal?”

“Mrs Shapiro. Yes.”

“She’s in solitary. She int allaared visitors.”

“Why not?”

“Bin a naughty gel, ent she?”

“Why? What’s she done?”

She stubbed our her cigarette on the path and threw the butt into the middle of the lawn, where there was already quite a scattering.

“It’s what she ent done. She won’t sign the Powah. Keeps refusin’. Bonkers, if yer ask me. They won’t let ‘er aht till she signs it.”

“Do you know which room she’s in?”

The rain had almost stopped. She pulled a cigarette packet out of her dressing-gown pocket and looked inside. There were only two left.

“Yer won’t forget me cigs next time, will yer?”

“No. I promise.”

She placed one of the cigarettes between her lips and let it rest there for a few moments, savouring the anticipation, before she took the box of matches from the other pocket.

“Twen’y-seven.”

“Thanks.”

“If she in’t there, she’ll be watchin’ telly in twen’y-three. That’s my room. They all watch telly in there.”

“Isn’t there a day room?”

“Yeh, there is. But the telly’s crap.”

Mrs Shapiro’s room was just as small as the other one, and just as hot, but the smell was more sickly than deathly, and there was no television. She looked dreadful. She was lying on her bed, fully clothed, staring at the ceiling. Her hair was wild and matted, the silver line now a highway, her skin loose and baggy, folding in deep yellowy wrinkles around her mouth and chin.

“Mrs Shapiro?”

“Georgine?”

She struggled to her feet groggily and stared at me.

“How are you?” I hugged her. She seemed so frail, like a bird. All bones.

“Thenk Gott you come.”

“I’m sorry I didn’t come before. I tried, but they wouldn’t let me in.”

“Did you bring me cigarettes?”

“Sorry. I forgot.”

“Never mind. Good you heff come, Georgine. I do not want to die in here!”

She sat down on the edge of the bed and immediately started to cry, her skinny shoulders shaking. How small and bent she seemed. I sat beside her, stroking her back until the sobs turned to sniffles. Then I passed her a tissue.

“We’ve got to get you home. But I don’t know how.”

“Too much guards in this place. Like in prison.” She blew her nose, then opened up the tissue to examine the snot. It had a horrible greenish colour. “How are my dear cats?”

“They’re fine. Waiting for you. I’ve got some young men staying there, looking after them. Fixing the house up.” I saw the look of alarm on her face. “Don’t worry. As soon as you’re ready to come home, they’ll leave.”

The smell in the room was making me feel faint. I stood up and opened a window. The soupy overheated air stirred, and we could hear the traffic on the Lea Bridge Road, and voices of children playing somewhere nearby. Mrs Shapiro took a deep breath, and her eyes seemed to brighten a bit.

“Thenk you, darlink.” She squeezed my hand, studying me with her wrinkled eyes. “You looking better Georgine. Nice lipstick. Nice scarf. You got a new husband yet?”

“Not yet.”

“Maybe soon I will heff a new husband.” She smiled archly to see the look of surprise cross my face. “Nicky is saying he wants to marry mit me.”

“Mr Wolfe?”

I gasped. The scheming devil! I remembered how fluttery she’d been when he’d sat in her kitchen plying her with sherry.

“I was thinking he would be for you the perfect husband, Georgine. But you heff showed a little interest. So maybe this is an opportunity for me.” Her smile now was coyly flirtatious. She had cheered up considerably. “What you think? Should I marry my Nicky?”

“Does he know how old you are?”

“I tolt him I was sixty-one.” She caught my eye and giggled. “I am too notty for you, Georgine, isn’t it?”