2009 - We Are All Made of Glue (40 page)

It was a fresh, cold day, with splashes of sunlight spilling through raggy clouds. Small bright buds were bursting on the ash tree saplings trees in the garden at Canaan House—it seemed as though they’d appeared overnight—and the white plastic garden furniture gleamed invitingly.

Nobody answered the doorbell when I rang. I crouched down and peered in through the letter box. There were no signs of human life, though a couple of felines were dozing in the pram which was parked under the stairs. I thought I caught a glimpse of movement at the end of the corridor, and then I noticed something very alarming—water seemed to be dripping down from a crack in the ceiling and collecting in a pool on the hall floor. A moment later, Chaim Shapiro appeared in his shirtsleeves. I rang the doorbell again to get his attention, but he just looked up at the leaking ceiling, shouted something into the back of the house, then vanished up the stairs. The drip of water had intensified into a trickle. Suddenly Nabeel and Mr Ali materialised, legs first, running down the stairs and shouting at each other. I rang the bell again, and Mr Ali came and opened the door. I thought he’d opened it for me, but he raced right past me, out through the door and round to the back of the house. I followed him, and watched as he started frantically pulling away at the grass and weeds near the kitchen door to reveal a small metal hatch cover, which he removed. Still shouting at Nabeel, who was behind us, he rolled up his sleeve and reached into the hole in the ground.

“What’s happening?” I asked Nabeel.

Nabeel flashed his beautiful eyes, pointed a finger upwards, and shouted back to Mr Ali. Then he raced back to the front of the house. I followed behind. The two tabbies in the pram in the hall were awake by now. They roused themselves, stretched mardily, and slunk out into the garden, their ears flat with irritation at being disturbed. Then Mrs Shapiro turned up, tottering on her high heels, waving a cigarette in her hand.

“Ah! Georgine! Thenk Gott you come!” She flung her arms around me.

“What’s going on?”

“Votter creases! I was telephoning to you!”

“Water creases?”

“They are trying to mek votter pipe diversion into the penthouse suite.”

“Chaim! Chaim!” she yelled up the stairs. “What you doing? Heffh’t we got enough votter pissing down already?”

The trickle of water had become a steady stream; I noticed that the water was pleasantly warm. The hall was filling up with steam like a bathroom. Above us, the plaster ceiling was beginning to bow, while Mrs Shapiro was mopping determinedly but hopelessly at the puddle with a silk blouse she’d pulled out of the pram, kneeling down on all fours and holding her cigarette between her lips. Now Mr Ali appeared in the doorway. He shook his head with a philosophical air and sighed as he gazed at the stream of water, which was fast becoming a torrent.

“It comes out of the tank. Not men’s water,” he explained to Mrs Shapiro. Then he shouted something at Nabeel, who bowed his head and slouched off upstairs. Mr Ali shrugged apologetically. “Completely useless.”

I was still puzzling over the gender status of the hot water when Ishmail and Chaim Shapiro came running down the stairs, almost colliding with Nabeel on the way up. Chaim pointed at the water coming through the ceiling, and shouted, rather unnecessarily, “Water water everywhere!”

“Men’s now off, but water still coming out,” Mr Ali shouted back.

Ishmail shouted at Nabeel. Mrs Shapiro shouted at Chaim, who shouted back at her. I shouted at him to shut up. Soon everybody was shouting at everybody else. Somewhere in the house, Wonder Boy started to howl. Mrs Shapiro had given up trying to mop the floor with the silk blouse, and started flicking it at her stepson.

“Is all your fault. You wanted to make votter separation. Jewish votter, Arab votter. So! Now we have pissing votter.”

“Not my fault, Ella. Useless Arabs cut the wrong pipe.”

Then the doorbell rang.

We all fell silent and looked at the door. Through the frosted glass I could see a tall dark figure looming. Nobody moved. The bell rang again. I opened the door. It was Mr Diabello.

“Hello…” He stared at the scene in the hall, taking in the flushed faces peering through the clouds of steam, the wet floor and the pouring water. “Georgina, I just wanted to…”

“Come in. We’re having a bit of a water crisis…”

“Who is this?” asked Mrs Shapiro, pulling herself up straight and smiling at the handsome stranger. “Are you another Attendent?”

“Let me introduce Mr Wolfe’s partner,” I said. “Mark Diabello.”

“My Nicky’s partner? How charming!” She fluttered her eyelids.

He stepped forward, proffering his hand, his chin-dimple winking, his smile-creases crinkling, his green-gold-black eyes flickering non-stop.

“Delighted, Mrs Shapiro. If I could just trouble you for a second—the house deeds…”

At that moment, there was a horrible wrenching sound above our heads. Everyone looked up. One of the ornate Doric-style plaster corbels supporting the Romanesque arch where the water had come through had started to crack away. Even as we watched, the crack widened. The corbel slipped sideways and slid. Mr Diabello seemed to stagger as he took a step back. His knees sagged. His mouth opened, but no sound came out. Then he fell to the ground with a thud. He had been stunned by a stunning period feature.

Poor Mr Diabello. By the time the ambulance arrived he was sitting up on the wet floor, propped against the wall beneath the grey mark where the picture of Lydda had hung—it was the cat-poo spot, though any lingering cat poo would have long since been washed away—pressing a clean white handkerchief to a gash in his head.

Yet after his accident, a strange exhausted peace fell on the house. The water finally stopped running when the hot water tank that held the immersion heater had emptied out. Ishmail got a broom and started sweeping the water out of the hall through the front door—there must have been several gallons. The cats danced around the eddies of water, excited by all the action but not wanting to get their paws wet. Mrs Shapiro danced around, too, making encouraging noises. Nabeel went into the kitchen to make a pot of coffee. As the door swung open, I overheard a snippet of conversation.

§

Mr Ali: Where you get your tool kit, Chaim? Chaim Shapiro: B&Q. You want to see it?

§

I sat with Mr Diabello until the ambulance arrived.

“I thought you might be here. I came to see you, Georgina,” he murmured. “I didn’t realise your hubby was back.”

“Yes. I should have told you. I’m sorry. You and me—it’s over between us, Mark.” I squeezed his hand as they led him away to the ambulance. “But it was fun.”

“Mrs Shapiro,” I said, keeping my voice casual, “Do you happen to know where the deeds for this house are kept?”

Mr Ali and Chaim Shapiro had gone off to B&Q together in manly silence and we were having a companionable cup of coffee by the fire in the study, with Prokofiev’s piano sonatas tinkling on the record player and the soggy
Lion King
slippers steaming away on the fender.

“What for I need deeds?” She looked at me through narrowed eyes.

“Apparently the house isn’t registered with the Land Registry.”

“On this house I been paying rets sixty years no problem.”

“Mr Diabello said it would better to register in case you want to sell up at any time.”

“I am not selling nothing.”

“Of course there’s no reason
why
you should sell.” There was no point in arguing with her. “But it would be better for you if the house was registered in your name, Mrs Shapiro. Then no one could take it away from you.”

She reached in her bag for a cigarette and stuck it between her lips.

“You think Chaim wants to take it away from me?”

“Everybody wants it. Chaim. Mrs Goodney. Even Mr Wolfe and Mr Diabello. It’s a desirable property.”

“And what about you, Georgine?”

She said it casually, fumbling in her bag for the matches, not looking at me. I wondered whether it was an accusation.

“It’s a really lovely house,” I said, “but I already have a house of my own.”

“When I am dead, Georgine, darlink, you can heff it.”

I laughed. “It’s kind of you, but it’s too big for me. Too many problems.”

“You can heff it, so long as you will liff in it and pay the rets.”

She gripped my hand and pulled me towards her. Suddenly she was intensely serious.

“This house—it belongs to no one. Artem found it empty. Abandoned. Inhebitents ran away.”

“But why…?”

“You know, Artem was just new married. He was needing somewhere to live.”

“With Naomi?”

She avoided my eyes. “It was the wartime. German bombings. People running everywhere.”

Above our heads there was a clang of copper pipes and a tirade of words. Chaim and Mr Ali must have got back from B&Q. There was suddenly a lot of running up and down stairs and clattering and shouting going on in the background.

“So they moved in?”

“Such a beautiful house, isn’t it? Even a piano. Bechstein. Sometimes
Mutti
and I came to play on it. He played on the violin, we accompanied mit the piano.”

“Two brown eyes.”

“You know, Georgine, I was only a young girl. I didn’t know anything—I knew only that I was in loff.” She pursed her lips and puffed a couple of smoke rings; they drifted towards the fire on the warm draught, and vanished in the flames. “When you are in lofF, when you heff an idea in your head, you are not always thinking about the consequence.”

My mind tripped back to my conversation with the Scarlet-mouthed Slut, her tentative apology that I’d accepted with such bad grace.

“You thought being in love made it okay?”

“I thought only that I could not live without him. And she was no good for him, that one. Always she was nagging him to go to Israel. A poor man like this with ruined lungs. What use he will be in Israel?”

“So she went on her own?”

“She was blazing like a person on fire. She could not sit still. Always talking of Zion—of making a homeland for all the Jews of the world. But he wanted only to die in peace.” A bit of wood shifted on the fire and clouds of ash drifted on to the fender. “Already he was dust.”

“Didn’t you feel…?”

She shrugged and tossed her head in a vague gesture. “I was looking after him. He could not be on his own. He was saying he will go there when he is better.”

What I really wanted to ask was—did she feel guilty? For stealing Naomi’s husband, and Chaim’s father.

“She wrote to him from Israel, didn’t she?”

She nodded. “Yes. Those letters. I burned them all.” Her face was turned away towards the fire, so I could not read her expression. “Not all of them.”

The dance of the polymers

I
t wasn’t until I got home that evening that I realised I still had the Space Invaders Easter egg in my bag. I unwrapped it and put it at the back of the cupboard. It was so vile that I couldn’t bring myself to give it to Stella or Ben.

“Who was that man?” Stella asked as we were clearing up together after a Thai curry dinner. We were alone together in the basement kitchen. Rip and Ben were watching football upstairs.

“What man?”

“That smooth creepy guy in the Jag who came round this afternoon while you were out?” Her lip curled with disapproval.

“Oh, he must have been the estate agent. He wants to buy a house from an old lady I know who lives at Totley Place. Why?”

“Daddy answered the door. They both seemed a bit surprised to see each other.” She gave me a hard look. “He had a bunch of flowers. White roses.”

“Really? They were probably for someone else.”

“No, he left them. They’re in my room. I told Daddy they were for me.”

“Thanks, Stella. You can keep them. I don’t want them.”

She grinned, a quick glimmer of a grin.

Next day Rip gave me a peck on the cheek before he left for work, and maybe that’s what made it difficult to write about Gina’s revenge. Although I had some glue stuff to catch up on, I was determined to finish Chapter 8, so I set my laptop aside and opened up my exercise book.

GINA’S REVENGE continued

Disguised as an
itinerant window cleaner rag-and-bone
woman
Avon lady she made her way to Holty Towers and in the dead of night, she tiptoed through to the luxurious
ensuit onsite ensued
(bloody Microsoft!—1 was using the spellchecker on my laptop because my dictionary was still propping up a shelf in the mezzanine study) bathroom and got the deadly
tube vial
phial out of her Avon box and squeezed a thin layer of extra strong adhesive on to the seat of the
toilet
lavatory. Then she turned the cold tap on in the basin
so
that it ran in a steady stream. Tinkle tinkle tinkle. A smile suffused her rosy lips
.

§

But something wasn’t right. I was starting to feel a bit sorry for Rick. Okay, so he had his flaky moments, but there was something endearing about him, wasn’t there? Those blond tumbled curls. The vulnerability of the sleeping man. And Gina—wasn’t she a bit off the rails too, falling for that dodgy mandolin player? What a pair of idiots Rick and Gina were. Why couldn’t they just sort their differences out and stick together? I realised that something inside me had shifted—I was no longer very interested in revenge. I was ready to move on.

I closed my exercise book and clicked open the
Adhesives
document I was meant to be working on. “The Chemistry of Adhesive Bonding.” On New Year’s Eve, when we’d joined hands, like molecules grabbing hold of each other, and sung ‘Auld Lang Syne’, I’d had a flash of insight into polymerisation. Now I discovered something even better—polymerisation depends on sharing. An atom which is short of an electron looks out for another atom that’s got the right sort of electron (it’s called covalency, for the chemically inclined), then the atom grabs the electron it needs. But no theft or nastiness is involved. The two atoms end up sharing the electron, and that’s what holds all the atoms together in one beautiful long endlessly repeating dance—the beauty of glue!