2009 - We Are All Made of Glue Read online

  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.

  The Splattered Heart

  Chapter 1

  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?”

  3

  Shelflife

  After 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?”

  As she said the word, I noticed a fishy undernote welling up through the cheese-and-Chanel. It was coming from her trolley. I saw that among her bargain produce were several packs of fish, all REDUCED. I hesitated. This fish definitely smelled off. Even Mum would have given it a miss.

  “You come in my house, I will cook them for you.”

  Poor old thing, she must be lonely, I thought.

  “I’d love to, but…” But what?

  I was trying to muster an excuse when she let out a bloodcurdling shriek.

  “No no! You teef!”

  There was a sudden angry scuffle in the aisle and a clang of shopping trolleys being barged. The pensioner from whose hand she’d grabbed the sausages had sneakily tried to pinch them back out of my basket. Mrs Shapiro snatched them from him and brandished them in the air.

  “Teef! You pay for you own sossedge full price if you want it!”

  Defeated and humiliated the pensioner slunk away. She turned towards me, flushed with triumph.

  “I am liffing not far from you. Big house. Big garden. Too many trees. Totley Place. Kennen House. You come on Saturday seven o’clock.”

  “Have you got a Nectar Card?” asked the girl at the checkout, swiping my bargains over the bar-code reader (where did that vile-looking cheese sauce come from?).

  I shook my head, and muttered something Rip-like about the surveillance society. Behind me, Mrs Shapiro had got into an argument with someone else in the queue and I was planning a quick getaway.

  “Bravo, darlink! These surveyors are getting everywhere,” she cried, barging her way towards the exit, bashing the legs of the man in the next queue with her trolley. He was a big man with a stubble of close-cropped blond hair, built like a rugby player. He turned round and gave her an unsmiling stare.

  “Sorry, sorry, darlink.” The crimson lipstick flashed. The blue eyelids fluttered. The man shook his head, as though saddened by the presence of lunatics.

  He made his way through the checkout and out into the car park. I watched him load his purchases into a massive black tinted-windowed four-by-four parked in a disabled bay in front of Mrs Shapiro’s pram. Immediately behind him, a blue Robin Reliant had pulled in tight, sideways on. It had a disabled badge in the window. He put the four-by-four—it looked like one of those American military Humvee things—into reverse and started to back up, but the Robin Reliant was blocking him in. On the other side, Mrs Shapiro was loading her purchases into her pram. He edged forward and stuck his head out of the window.

  “Can you just shift your pram, lady, so I can pull round?”

  “One moment, please!” Mrs Shapiro cried, “I need a new reduction!” She’d found a bruise on a not-past-sell-by-date apple, and was heading off back into the shop to negotiate a discount.

  While I was waiting, the owner of the Robin Reliant returned. He was a little shrivelled man, propping himself up with a stick. He got into the Reliant, took a meat pie out of a paper bag, and started to eat. The man in the Humvee beeped his horn loud and long, but the meat-pie man carried on eating. The Humvee started to reverse, slowly slowly, until his rear bumper touched the door panel of the Reliant. Tunk! There was a distinct jolt as it made contact. By now a few people had gathered on the pavement to watch. I spotted the two fat ladies from the sticker scrum, eating biscuits out of a bag. The Big Issue seller had come round from the front of the store, and a girl who’d been handing out leaflets when I arrived. They were all yelling at him to stop. The meat-pie man was taking his time, savouring every bite.

  Suddenly the Humvee driver slammed into forward, swung the wheel round as far as it would go, and started inching his chrome bumper towards where I was standing by Mrs Shapiro’s pram. There was something about the fixed set of his jaw, the way his eyes stared straight ahead, refusing to look at me, that made me livid. I positioned myself defiantly in front of the pram, gripping the handle tight, with my own shopping bags wedged between my feet. I hadn’t picked this fight, but I was prepared for martyrdom. The driver beeped his horn and carried on inching. He was going to barge the pram right out of the way with his bully bull bars!

  Then Mrs Shapiro emerged beaming from the supermarket, brandishing the apple, which now had a REDUCED sticker on it.

  “They give me five pence off!”

  She pulled a packet of cigarettes and a box of matches out from under the hood of the pram, offered me one—which I declined—and lit up.

  “Thenk you, Georgine, for waiting,” She nodded in the direction of the Big Issue salesman and the leaflet girl, and whispered loud enough for them to hear, “Looks like gypsies, isn’t it? They want to steal my shoppings?”

  “No, they’re…”

  “Just shift your bloody pram, you old bat!” snarled the Humvee driver of his window.

  “Don’t you dare talk to her like that, you big bully!” I hissed back.

  “What he is saying, Georgine?”

  “I think he wants you to move the pram, Mrs Shapiro, so that he can get his car out. But just take your time.”

  She fluttered her azure eyelids at him.

  “Sorry, sorry, darlink.”

  Swaying a little on her heels, she manoeuvred the pram out of the way and tottered off down the road towards Chapel Market, still puffing away.

  4

  Bonding dissimilar materials

  When I got home, I put the kettle on for a cup of tea and ph
oned Mum to tell her about my pram adventure. I knew she’d be as intrigued by Mrs Shapiro as I was. (Dad, on the other hand, would approve of my befriending a vulnerable old lady.) Mum had turned seventy-three in October and time was weighing down on her. Her eyesight was beginning to deteriorate (“immaculate degeneration”) and the doctor had told her she shouldn’t drive any more. Dad had been struck down with the ‘waterworks mither’. Her son, my brother Keir, five years divorced, with two sons he hardly ever saw, was posted in Iraq. And now I was splitting up with my husband. Just at the time when she should have been sailing into a rosy sunset, everything on her horizon seemed stormy and unsettled.

  To cheer her up, I launched into a description of my bargains.

  “Chicken korma, Mum. Reduced from £2.99 to £1.49.”

  “Oh, lovely. What’s a chicken corner?”

  Mum isn’t stupid, but she’s partially deaf—my nana had measles during her pregnancy. Dad and I tease her because she refuses to wear a hearing aid. (“People’ll say I’m an alien if I start going around wi’ bits of wire coming out of my head.” Actually, where I come from, in Kippax, they might.)

  “Chicken korma. It’s Indian. Sort of spicy and creamy.”

  “Oah, I don’t know if your dad’d fancy that.” Her voice sounded flat and defeated.

  I tried another tack.

  “Have you read any good books recently, Mum?”

  In the right mood, this is her favourite topic, a guilty pleasure we share. When I was sixteen, Dad had given me a copy of The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, which I’d pretended to enjoy but had secretly found depressing and tedious, and Mum had introduced me to Georgette Heyer and Catherine Cookson, whom I pretended to despise, but secretly devoured.

  “Always look out for the underdog,” Dad had said.

  “There’s nowt to beat a happy ending,” said Mum. “I just finished Turquoise Temptation ,” she sighed down the phone. “But it were rubbish. Too much heavy breathing and ripped-up underwear.” A pause. “Have you seen owt of Euridopeas?”