2009 - We Are All Made of Glue (32 page)

I noticed that he had a Kent NUM tattoo on his forearm. How strange, I thought; if I had met him instead of Mr. Ali when I was first looking for the lock, there would have been a different point of connection, and quite a different story.

“It’s for…er…just, you know, general use.” I smiled mysteriously, picked up a few superglues, and put them in my shopping basket with a nonchalant air.

Another discovery I made, by the way, at the end of the adhesives aisle, is that duck tape has nothing at all to do with ducks. No quacking or waddling involved. In fact it’s duct tape. What a disappointment.

Out of interest, I passed by to look at the toilet seats. Although they had exotic names—Chamonix, Valencia, Rossini—they weren’t in fact very exciting. There were no musical ones or ones which lit up, as I’d seen advertised in the Sunday papers—seats designed to attract a curious bottom. I’d have to look on the internet. Ideally, I should get one that played a ridiculous but catchy tune like ‘Jingle Bells’ or ‘The Birdie Song’, that would keep going until the person got up—if they
ever
got up!

§

By the time I remembered I’d meant to call at Northmere House on the way back, I’d already overshot the stop again. That would have to wait for another day. I was filled with a pleasant feeling of satisfaction on my way home, sitting in my favourite seat, upstairs at the front, with my purchases in a bag on my knee and enjoying the changing patterns of clouds and light as the bus lumbered down the Lea Bridge Road.

At Clapton a group of schoolboys got on, jostling and giggling. I didn’t notice at first that they were wearing small skull caps. They crowded on to the top deck, and made a rush for the other front seat, all four of them, barging with their backpacks and trying to shove each other out of the way. Mrs Shapiro’s story was still fresh in my mind, and I wanted to talk to them, to ask about their parents and grandparents—about the countries they’d left and the journeys they’d made. But why should they have to worry about any of that old painful stuff? These lads—they didn’t have the air of exiles. They were gossiping about one of their teachers who, apparently, had been spotted at a Westlife concert wearing a dress that revealed too much. Let them be, I thought. Let them be happy. As we thundered along among the treetops, I closed my eyes and felt through my eyelids the brilliant spring light flicker over my face: dark-light-dark-light-dark-light. When I got off at the Balls Pond Road, a few stops later, I could still hear their peals of laughter as the bus pulled away. Let them be happy while they can.

As I turned the corner into my road, I saw there was a car parked outside my house. A black car. A Jaguar. I stopped. How long had he been waiting for me? Since the debacle with Nathan, I’d been feeling a sort of blank emptiness inside me. Now I felt my heart quicken, a beat between panic and pleasure. Or maybe I was just inexorably drawn. I carried on walking, wondering what I should say. As I got closer, the driver’s-side door opened, and he stepped out on to the pavement, all lean and hungry six-feet-something of him, with a bunch of flowers in his hands—blue irises. My heart did a skip.

“Doing a spot of DIY, are you, Georgina?” He was looking at my B&Q carrier bag with interest. “Have you got time for a quick word? About Canaan House? There are some…er…developments you should know about.”

“Developments?”

I glanced at my watch. It was Wednesday, just turned three o’clock.

“It’ll have to be quick. Ben’ll be back soon.”

I noticed he had a fresh white handkerchief in his jacket pocket, and despite my resolution, a tremor like a Pavlovian response ran through me.

“I thought you should know…my colleague, Nick Wolfe. You were right. His intentions are not honourable.
Very
not honourable.”

“You’d better come in.”

He followed me into the house. I shoved the B&Q bag in the bottom of a cupboard in the mezzanine study on my way down into the kitchen, and put the kettle on. While it boiled, I arranged the irises in a vase. They reminded me of Mrs Shapiro’s toilet bowl. He stood very close beside me, watching. I could sense the heat of his body through the centimetre of air between us, and that pleasant pelvic glow—it was the shameless woman, putting in a surprise guest (gusset) appearance.

“Tell me,” I said.

“Yes. Nick. He’s—how can I put it?—he’s got obsessed with Canaan House. He’s commissioned an architect; had plans drawn up to turn it into a gated community. Luxury flats. Done out to the highest spec. Penthouse suite. Basement gym. Enclosed Japanese-style garden with pebble and stone water-feature. The full monty. Plus six mews studios.”

I took a deep breath. I could smell the expensive soap, and beneath it the chlorine.

“Okay. And so what’s he planning to do with Mrs Shapiro?”

“He’s planning to marry her.”

He delivered his punchline with a slight lift of the eyebrows. I pretended to be shocked, but inside I was smiling.

“Apparently they struck up quite a friendship, and one day he asked her age. She had him on that she was sixty-one. Well, that roused his suspicions, so he sneaked a look at her medical records in the nursing home. They gave her age as ninety-six.”

“No! Really?” I feigned surprise.

“He thought—well, at that age her life expectancy—how can I put it?—it left a lot to be desired. A couple of years, at most. He reckoned he was on to a good thing.”

“Did he tell you she has a son?”

“He mentioned something along those lines. That’s why he’s in a hurry to tie the knot. If she’s married to him, he gets the lot when she pops her clogs. Unless she’s made a will, of course.”

“The son’s supposed to be coming all the way from Israel. He obviously thinks he’s on to a good thing, too. But I don’t know if he’s really her son. Her husband was married before, you know.”

Before what? That’s what I couldn’t work out. If Ella Wechsler had married Artem Shapiro, her name would have become Ella Shapiro. But why had she changed her first name from Ella to Naomi? Why would someone change their whole name?

“If she wasn’t married to him,” I was thinking aloud, “if she was just living with him…”

“Mm. Good point. Would she still have a claim on the house?” I could see his mind working in the gold flickering of his eyes.

“Does it make any difference, who was married to who? Surely, if she’s lived there all these years, the house is hers?”

“It depends on how the deeds were drawn up.” He was stirring the sugar into his coffee, tinkling the spoon against the china and looking at me with those vari-coloured eyes. I could feel myself melting inside. “It’d be interesting to sneak a look, Georgina. Do you know where they’re kept by any chance?”

They were probably among the sheaves of paper up in the attic. “I haven’t a clue,” I said, squeezing my tea bag sexily and fishing it out with a provocative little flick of the spoon.

“It might be possible to find out from the Land Registry,” he murmured.

He finished his coffee and stood up, leaning in the doorway, smiling darkly. “Shall we…?”

He led, I followed.

“You said you were going to show me your poems,” I said, teasing, but to my surprise he produced a slim cream envelope from the pocket of his jacket—not the handkerchief one, the one inside the lining.

“I’ve written one specially for you, Georgina.”

The envelope was slightly warm and curved to the contours of his body. I opened it curiously as he undressed me.

There was a poem, written out by hand, the letters squat and confident on the creamy paper.

§

I
wandered through the city streets My heart was burdened down with care, And then I saw thee standing there With raindrops sparkling on thy hair
.

§

Sweet Saint Georgina, thou art The dragon slayer of my heart. TeR me thou love me, for I know We’ll never be apart
.

§

I
couldn’t stop myself; I cringed; then I covered it up with an embarrassed kiss. “Mmm. That’s lovely,” I said.

“Glad you like it, sweetheart. Have you got the…?”

“The…?”

I fumbled in my bedside drawer for the shameless accessories, and slipped them on. He checked the gusset. He tightened the satin handcuffs. Thank heavens for IKEA slatted headboards, where would we be without them? thought the Shameless Woman as she sighed and lay back on the pillows. But the poem—the ugly doggerel—jangled in my head. I tried to abandon myself to shamelessness but it was no use. “Sweet Saint Georgina…Tell me thou love me…” And to think I had once dreamed of having an entourage of poet toy-boys! In the end I just had to fake it. Afterwards, when I was lying tense and sweaty in his arms, and he was stroking my hair and doing his hanky thing, I had a sudden memory of the first night Rip and I had spent together in his attic flat in Chapeltown. We’d lain together in the crumpled sheets looking at the candlelight flickering on the sloping ceiling, and he’d reached down a well-thumbed book from his shelf and read me John Donne’s ‘The Sunne Rising’. “
She is all states, and all princes I. Nothing else is
.”

What had happened to
that
Rip—not the always-in-a-huny destiny-shaping Progress Project Rip, but the other Rip who was as bouncy as a puppy, curious, funny, eager, idealistic, who read Donne and Marvell when we made love, and brought me Marmite on toast in the morning? What had happened to
him?
A pain like the shock of bereavement hit me right in the heart, making me flinch. What was I doing here? Why was I in bed with this man?

“Why did you use those words, thee and thou?” I asked.

“Don’t you like them?”

“I do, but…they’re a bit old-fashioned.”

“You strike me as being—how can I put it?—quite an old-fashioned girl, Georgina.” He ran a finger down my cheek. “I can change it if you don’t like it, sweetheart.”

The trouble is, I realised, I only wanted him wicked and wolfy. I didn’t want this touchy-feely gooey stuff. And I definitely didn’t want the poetry.

“No, leave it. It’s fine as it is. But…it should be thou lovest, not thou love.”

As soon as I said it, I wished I hadn’t. I didn’t mean it as a put-down—it was just my Eng Lit degree popping out in the wrong place.

“Lovest?” He sounded utterly crushed.

“But it’s fine as it is. Romantic. Please! Don’t change anything!”

But he was already sitting up and putting on his neatly folded clothes.

“Mark, you’ve forgotten…”

“Lovest!”

The door closed with a quiet click and he was gone.

I lay there for a while thinking about the poem. It wasn’t just the archaisms that bothered me, it was the flaky metaphor of Saint George and the dragon, and that ugly foreshortened last line, like a broken tooth. You’d have thought he could have found a couple of spare syllables to patch it up with. A sudden vivid memory caught me off guard: it was the first time Rip and I went down to Holtham at Christmas. Rip slipped his hand between my thighs as I drove and read me Donne’s poem ‘Nocturnal upon St Lucy’s Day’ as we crossed the wintry Pennines, rough with browned-off heather beneath which new shoots were already pushing into the black oozing peat. ‘
I am every dead thing, In whom love wrought new alchemy
.’ I was so overcome with passion that we had to stop in a lay-by. It’s not easy to make love in the back of a Mini, but I remembered how our bodies closed together like two shells of a bivalve.

Riding in on the memory came an intense pang of longing for Rip—for his warm solid body, his alert clever mind. In spite of the Sinclair confidence that bordered on arrogance, in spite of the Progress Project and the destiny-shaping work, in spite of the dereliction of DIY duties and the irritating BlackBerry habits, in spite even of the Scarlet-mouthed Slut, he was still Ben and Stella’s dad; yes, and he was still the man I loved. Maybe it was time to stop messing around with other men and start glueing my marriage together.

Just then, the front door slammed. It must be Ben letting himself in. I sat up and…no, I tried to sit up, but my wrists were still firmly strapped to the headboard. I tugged. Nothing happened. Irritated, I pulled harder, but the Velcro held fast.

“Mum?” Ben called from the kitchen.

“Hi, Ben. I’m just finishing something off. I’ll be with you in a minute.”

For God’s sake. It was only Velcro. But because of the way it was fastened on my wrists, when I tugged I was just pulling tighter on to the join. I tried to squeeze up my hands and slip them through the loops, but there was no slack. I could hear the crickle-crickle of the Velcro hooks under strain. Then the crickling stopped. My thumb joints were still in the way. My wrists were getting sore. My arms were aching. My heart was racing.
Don’t panic. In—two—three—four. Out
—two—
three—four
.

“D’you want some tea, Mum?”

“Lovely, thanks. NO! No, it’s all right. Just put the kettle on. I’ll come down.”

Next I tried using my teeth. I found that if I strained and wriggled, I could get my mouth within an inch of my left wrist. Half an inch. But no more. I tried the other side. That was worse. My arms weren’t long enough. Or maybe they were too long. I went back to the left side. I strained and strained. If I stuck my tongue out I could even touch the Velcro with the tip of it—I just couldn’t get it with my teeth. When my shoulder felt as though it was going to break, I gave up. Exhausted, I lay back on the pillows and considered my options. Then I realised I had no options. Well, the only option was to call out to Ben for help. That wasn’t really an option. I’d rather die. Then I became aware of another unpleasant sensation. I needed a pee.

“Kettle’s boiled!”

“Right! Thanks!”

I could tell Ben it was an accident. Oh, yeah. I could pretend I’d been trying out an experiment. Playing a game. Practising for a pantomime. Like you do. Trouble was, the duvet was down around my knees, and I was still wearing the red panties. And nothing else. There was nothing for it but to go back to the crickling. Each little crickle-crickle was a hook opening, I told myself. Just take it slowly. Forget about the bladder. Concentrate on the wrists. Concentrate on one wrist at a time. I seemed to have more power in my right wrist. I found that by moving the thumb joint and flexing my fingers up and down I could increase the crickling. Crickle-crickle-crickle. Crickle-crickle-crickle. The more gently I did it, the more it crickled. I could move my right thumb quite a bit now. I could fold it into my palm and ease it…ease it…yes, there it goes. My right hand was free. I reached across and freed my left hand. Then I grabbed my dressing gown and dashed to the toilet.