2009 - We Are All Made of Glue (16 page)

“To absent friends!” She raised a glass of tepid Country Manor—her third. “And death to Iraqis,” The reindeer antlers had slipped down her forehead and were pointing forward, as though she was getting ready to rut.

“Mum,” I whispered, “Keir’s supposed to be liberating them, not killing them.”

But it was too late. Dad leaned back in his chair and thumped his hands on the table.

“Got no business to be there at all.” His voice was loud enough to be heard next door. “If they ‘adn’t shut all t’ pits, they wouldn’t be so mad for oil now, would they?”

The war had thrown into sharp relief the differences between them: Mum passionately loyal to her family, Dad stubbornly loyal to his principles.

“Don’t start now, Dennis. It’s Christmas.” Mum reached out and laid her hand on his arm. She was wearing all her rings, gold, sapphire and diamond.

“Aye, but it in’t Christmas for them, is it?” said Dad, always the internationalist.

The Christmas lights on the tree winked on and off, competing with the turned-down TV in the corner, where King’s College choirboys were soundlessly singing their heads off.

“What d’you think of this turkey breast?” asked Mum, changing the subject. “It were on special.”

But Dad wasn’t to be deflected.

“I’d sooner ‘ave ‘ad Tony Blair trussed up and roasted. Wi’ all ‘is gizzards in.”

Mum leaned over to me and whispered loudly, “I don’t know what it is, but Christmas always gets ‘im gooin’.”

As she said it, I had a sudden vivid image from another Christmas—it was long before the strike, I must have been about ten at the time, and Keir five. A group of carol singers had come to the door. They were kids from the local school. They rang on the doorbell, and when Dad answered it, they started to sing in their little squeaky voices:

We three kings of Orient are
,

Bearing gifts we travel afar
.

Dad stood patiently and waited for them to finish. When they got to the end of the second verse, they fell silent. Probably that was as much as they knew. Dad reached in his pocket and gave them some change. Then just as they were mumbling their thanks, he burst into song:

The people’s flag is deepest red
,

It shrouded oft our martyred dead
…

His voice was deep and loud. Keir and I crept away and hid behind the sofa. The children stood there gawping. When he got on to the bit about the limbs growing stiff and cold, they suddenly turned and made a dash for it, and didn’t look back until they’d got to the end of the street.

“What d’you do that for, Dennis?” Mum scolded.

“They should teach ‘em in school,” said Dad mildly. “Proper history, not fairy tales.”

When we went back to school after the Christmas holidays, the kids were there waiting for me.

“Your dad’s potty,” they said.

“No ‘e in’t.” I stood and faced them out. “It’s because your singing were crap.”

I saw Dad wince now, as he shifted in his chair, and a stab of his pain got to me, too. Dear Dad—he’d never been afraid to jump in deep, and he’d always done what he thought was right, regardless of the consequences. I thought with a pang of sadness of Rip, Stella and Ben, spending their Christmas at Holtham without me. The food would be better, the gifts more extravagant, the decor subdued and tasteful. There would be no Santa slippers or reindeer antlers, no political arguments, no Highland-scene placemats or plastic tree with winking coloured lights. Stella would wallow in the Jacuzzi and flirt shamelessly with her grandpa. Ben would come back with some hi-tech gizmo for his computer, which he would discreetly hide in his bedroom so as not to upset me.

“Never mind, duck,” said Mum, reading my face. “There’s nowt like being wi’ yer own family at Christmas.”

We clinked our glasses together, Mum’s filled with the last of the Country Manor, Dad’s and mine with Old Peculiar. The mystery of the bread sauce was solved when Dad poured it over the Christmas pudding.

That night I lay awake in my old bed, listening to the voices in the next room. Mum had left a thick Danielle Steele out for me, but I couldn’t get into it, my mind was wandering into the past, retracing the journey I’d made away from my family. It was books that had changed my life—had catapulted me out of the coal-smoke semis of Kippax into university and a wider world beyond. When the careers teacher at Garforth Comp had asked me what I wanted to do, I said I wanted to be a writer. “Writing’s a great hobby,” he’d sighed, like one who knew. “But you’ll need a day job, too.”

I took an English degree at Exeter, then a postgraduate course in journalism at the London College of Printing. I was the first in my family to go to university—I know it’s a cliche now, but it wasn’t a cliche for us. After a traineeship on the
Dulwich Post
, I came back up to Yorkshire for a junior reporter’s job on the
Bradford Telegraph and Argus
, in order to be nearer to home. Then I got a lucky break on the
Evening Post
in Leeds. Somewhere along the line, it happened so gradually that I didn’t notice, I stopped talking Yorkshire and thinking Kippax. Nowadays you might just notice the flatness in my vowels when I say ‘bath’; and marrying Gavin Connolly is no longer the pinnacle of my ambition. They didn’t resent it. Mum kept a scrapbook of news clippings with my byline, which she brought out on any excuse. They were proud of me, my mum and dad.

They’d made their own journeys, too. Dad had gone into the coal industry after the war, and when he’d had a pint or two he would wax lyrical over the post-war settlement, when the family, the community, the pit, the union, the government, the nation, the United Nations, had all flowed seamlessly one into the other. It had given him all he had, and he’d done his bit in return, studying at night school to get his deputy’s ticket, reading his textbooks at the coal face by the light of his lamp, because it was his belief that he should use his abilities on behalf of those less able than himself. When Ledston Luck closed in 1986, along with 160 other pits that closed in the wake of the strike, men like my dad and my brother were thrown out of that embracing society into a different kind of world. ‘Maggie’s Britain’, Dad called it, and he never said it without a sneer. It wasn’t his country any more.

Keir—he was just twenty-one at the time—survived by finding himself a new family: the Royal Engineers filled the gap left by the pit and the NUM. There were postcards of Keir building bridges in exotic places surrounded by smiling dark-skinned children; Keir wearing civvies and drinking a beer against the backdrop of an awesome snow-capped mountain; Keir and his mates grinning under their helmets, posing beside a jeep in a desert somewhere. “Look where ‘e is now, our lad,” Mum would murmur, running her fingers over the glossy prints.

Dad was shifted to the Selby coalfield, and when that closed, too, he was still young enough to get the redundo, old enough to get a decent pension and free coal for life, and bolshie enough to take on the chairmanship of the local Labour Party. He dedicated his life to the overthrow of Maggie, and pursued it with the same dogged diligence as he’d once sniffed out the firedamp. He never quite forgave Keir for joining the army, nor me for marrying Rip, but he never gave up on us either, just as he never gave up on the Labour Party, even when Tony Blair turned out to be, as he called him, the mini-Maggie.

Mum, on the other hand, had blossomed during the eighties. She loved the shoulder pads and the jewellery. She loved gadding about on coaches during the strike, and shouting at the top of her voice. Afterwards, rather than accept defeat, she put her new-found organising skills to good use and enrolled in a night class in Castleford to learn bookkeeping. Just as Dad was squaring up to retirement, Mum was opening the door on a new career, doing the books for Pete’s Plaice, Annie’s Antiques, Sparky Steve, All-night Abdul, Curl Up and Dye, and various other small businesses that came and went in the former pit villages. For the first time in her life she was financially independent. Then around the time Rip and I were splitting up, she started to lose the central vision in her left eye. It would be slow, the doctor said, but progressive.

Somewhere in the darkened house, a door clicked and a toilet flushed. It must be Dad, battling with his prostate as stubbornly as he’d once battled with global capitalism. Then there was a second flush and a sound of voices in the kitchen. The whistle of the kettle, the clink of cups. In the daytime, they’d put on a brave face for me, but at night all their worries crept back and beset them. They couldn’t get to sleep, so they were having a cup of tea together. My mum and dad.

I lay there in the dark, listening to the murmur of their voices and thinking about Christmas. Really, when you consider, it’s not a very nice story. Okay, a baby was born, and there were angels, and a star in the sky—that bit’s not so bad—but what about poor Mary having to travel all that way on a donkey—in her condition? The three kings with their sinister gifts? Then the slaughter of the innocents? And that was just the beginning; after that, there were crucifixions, a resurrection—with Armageddon and the Second Coming still to look forward to.

My mind flashed to the conversation I’d had with Ben about Jesus and the end of the world, the look of fear in his eyes as he tried to rationalise the irrational. Yes, Christmas is a dangerous time, I thought. Sometimes it can be better just to stay at home until it all blows over.

The festive season

W
hen I got back to London on the day after Boxing Day, Wonder Boy was waiting for me at the front door with a dead bird. I supposed it was his idea of a gift, so I let him into the kitchen and gave him a saucer of milk, even though I’d previously resolved not to encourage him. Well, it was Christmas. He thanked me by lifting his tail and spraying against the dishwasher. Thanks, Wonder Boy.

Ben wasn’t going to be back for a few days. Even
Adhesives
was having a break—the next issue wasn’t due out until early March. Nathan phoned me to wish me a happy New Year and share a joke with me.

“What beats glue when it comes to bonding?” he murmured in his conspiratorial voice.

“I don’t know. Tell me.”

“Hybrid bond. Glue and a screw. Geddit?” I imagined him with his white coat casually unbuttoned, chuckling glueily at the end of the phone. After he’d hung up, the silence of the house closed in around me.

That first night at home, I tossed and turned in my half-empty double bed and wished I was back in my old room in Kippax with the TV on too loud and Mum and Dad making cups of tea in the middle of the night. Of course, I knew that if I’d been there I’d only be wishing I’d stayed here—it wasn’t here, and it wasn’t Kippax—the bug was inside me, gnawing away.

It’s at moments like this that you seek consolation in literature. I made myself a cup of tea and reached for my exercise book.

Christmas at Holty Towers was an orgy of gluttony and conspicuous consumption which Gina found
dangerously
tempting
absolutely disgusting. Mrs
Sinclair
Sinster gave Mr
Sinclair
Sinster a
yatch a private jet
a
Rolox watch a silver hip flask set of golf clubs, although he already had four sets
,
because he already also had everything else.

§

Actually, let’s face it, I have no idea what those sort of people would give each other. Although the Sinclairs weren’t the super-rich Sinsters of
The Splattered Heart
, Ben and Stella were their only grandchildren, and they did tend to go overboard on the gifts at Christmas. Stella accepted everything with effusive thanks and, when she was old enough, wheedled the receipts out of the donors and took the items back to exchange for the things she really wanted. Ben accepted everything guiltily and donated the unwanted gifts to the Animal Sanctuary, where he’d developed a special relationship with a rescued donkey called Dusty. Ben and Stella; so dear, so different. I closed up my exercise book and lay quietly in the dark, calling up their faces into my mind, missing them.

§

The day before New Year’s Eve, the phone rang at about five minutes to midnight. It hauled me up abruptly out of a deep groggy sleep. I fumbled for the receiver and the bedside light, and managed to knock my glass of water on the floor.

“Hello?”

“It’s me.” The voice sounded muffled and squeaky.

“Who’s that?”

“It’s me. Ben.”

“Ben! Whatever’s the matter? D’you know what time it is?”

“Mum, will you be in tomorrow? I’m coming home. I forgot my key.”

His voice sounded unfamiliar—slightly croaky, with a touch of London that I hadn’t noticed before.

“Of course. But I thought you were staying until after New Year.”

“I was. But now I’m coming back tomorrow. The train gets in ten past three.”

There was just the hint of a tremor as he spoke. If I hadn’t been his mother, I wouldn’t have noticed it.

“Do you want me to meet you at Paddington?”

“No, it’s okay. I’ll get the bus.”

“Is everything all right?”

“Yeah. Fine.”

“But why…?”

“I’ll tell you when I see you.”

Click.

After that, it was at least an hour before I could get back to sleep. Something must have happened, I thought. There must have been a row.

§

In fact it was about half past four by the time Ben got back next day. Either the train was late, or there’d been no bus. I found myself glancing at the clock, waiting with the same anxious eagerness as I’d once waited for Rip to come home after a business trip. Then the doorbell rang, and there he was, my boy, standing on the doorstep in the wintry dusk, with his bulging backpack and a carrier bag in each hand. My heart bounced with joy, even though it’d been only just over a week since we’d said goodbye.

“Hi, Muni.”

“Hi, Ben.”

He dumped his bags down in the hall and stood there, grinning stiffly with his arms by his sides while I hugged him, tolerating this embarrassing ritual, but not actively taking part. He looked both thinner and taller, as if he’d sprouted up an inch or two in the last week. There was a shadow of a moustache on his upper lip. His hair had grown, too, and he had it tied up in a little red kerchief knotted behind his ears, pirate-style. This was new.