2009 - We Are All Made of Glue (35 page)

Mrs Goodney stopped in her tracks when she saw me standing in the doorway. She eyed me up for a few moments. Then she continued her advance. Now a third person, a tall spindly youth, appeared on the garden path and made his way towards us. It was Damian Lee, the young man from Hendricks & Wilson, his hair sticking up with gel, his suit a bit too short in the legs. Blue socks. He was looking up and around, studying the house, avoiding my eyes.

“Feeding the cats again, are we?” said Mrs Goodney to me. I was so taken aback by her rudeness that I forgot to ask her what she was doing here. She turned to Damian and smiled toothily.

“Glad you could make it, Mr Lee. The gentleman just needs an initial estimate of value at this stage.”

The thickset man nodded. He was looking at the house in frank amazement, his misaligned eyes sliding around this way and that. Then I realised one of them was made of glass.

“Must be vort a bit, eh?” he said. “Big house like this. Good part of London town. I am somewhat impressed.” His English was better than Mrs Shapiro’s, if a bit pedantic, with just a slight guttural accent.

Damian took a dog-eared notebook out of his pocket and started to make notes with a stub of pencil. He was still avoiding my eyes.

“Unfortunately it’s not worth as much as you think. It’s in poor condition, as you can see.” Mrs Goodney was simpering at the glass-eye man. “I’ve had a reputable builder to view it and he reports that it needs a substantial amount of money spending on it to bring it up to present-day standards. I’ll show you his report if you like.” The glass-eye man sniffed discontentedly, but Mrs Goodney placed one plump red-nailed gold-ringed hand on his arm and the other on Damian’s. “Don’t worry, Mr Lee’ll quote you a good price. Won’t you, Mr Lee?”

Damian nodded and chewed the end of his pencil.

“This is what you do for your five grand, is it, Damian?” I hissed. He ignored me and carried on chewing.

“Seems like she’s already had some builders in. Cowboys, by the look of it.” Her eye had fallen on the UPVC window on the first floor.

“He’s not a cowboy,” I blurted out. They all stared at me. “He’s…”

Then I noticed that their gaze had shifted away from me to a point somewhere beyond my left shoulder. I turned round. Mrs Shapiro was standing there, and behind her, Nabeel and Ishmail.

“Hello, Mrs Shapiro,” Mrs Goodney’s rusty-gate voice squeaked with fake cheeriness. “What are you doing here, sweetie? You’re supposed to be…”

“I am come home. Finish mit Nightmare.”

“But you can’t stay here on your own. This house isn’t safe for you, poppet.”

“Poppet schmoppet.” She pulled herself up into her five-feet-tall, chin-out-fighting pose and looked the social worker in the eye. Her cheeks were still flushed from the excitement of the morning. “I heff my attendents. I will claim the attendents allowance.”

The young men standing behind her flashed their teeth and their eyes at everybody. Violetta, who seemed to have snuck in with Mussorgsky, was hovering around our feet rubbing herself against Mrs Shapiro’s legs and purring. Unexpectedly, she arched her back and hissed at Mrs Goodney, who almost—you could see it in her face—hissed back.

Suddenly the man with the glass eye stepped forward and fixed Mrs Shapiro with his disconcerting gaze.

“Ella? You are Ella Wechsler?”

Mrs Shapiro drew back. I couldn’t see her face, but I could hear her throaty intake of breath. “You are mistooken. I am Naomi Shapiro.”

“You are not Naomi Shapiro.” His voice was gravelly. “She was my mother.”

“I don’t know what you talking about.” Mrs Shapiro elbowed past me, reached out, and slammed the door.

§

They didn’t go away for about half an hour. Standing inside the freshly painted hall, the four of us listened to them ringing on the doorbell and rattling the letter box. Then we heard their voices as they walked round the outside of the house and started rapping on the kitchen door. Somewhere in the depths of the house, Wonder Boy started to yowl. Eventually they gave up.

I didn’t leave until I was sure the coast was clear. I walked home slowly, trying to make sense of what had happened. He must be the real Naomi Shapiro’s son—the child she wrote about in her letters, the gummy brown-eyed baby in the photo—this thickset, ugly middle-aged man who had embodied all the idealism and hopes of his beautiful mother. But who was she? And how had Mrs Goodney contacted him? Maybe this was why I’d found no documents or papers in the house—Mrs Goodney had got there first. Had got them and used them to summon up this genie from the past.

As soon as I got home I went up to my bedroom, and spread the photos out on the floor. Baby Artem; the wedding photo; the couple by the fountain; the woman in the archway; the two women at the Highbury house; the Wechsler family; the moshav near Lydda. At half past four, Ben wandered in to see what I was doing, and pointed out something so obvious I should have noticed it before.

“I wonder why he’s carrying a gun.”

“Who?”

“The man who took the photo. Look.”

He pointed to a dark patch on the stony foreground in the landscape photograph. It was the shadow of the photographer—the sun was behind him, and you could see the outline of the head and shoulders, the arms raised to hold the camera to the eye, and something long and straight hanging down from one shoulder. Yes, it could be a gun.

He picked up the photograph of the woman standing in the stone archway and turned it over.

“Who’s she?”

“I think she must be Naomi Shapiro.”

“The old lady down the road?”

“No, someone else.”

“It says Lydda.”

“That’s a place. In Israel.”

“I know, Mum. It’s in one of the prophecies. It’s supposed to be where the Antichrist returns.” His voice had gone husky.

“Don’t be daft, Ben,” I said. Then I saw the look in his eyes. “Sorry—I didn’t mean
you’re
daft, I meant
it
’s daft. All that Antichrist stuff. Putin and the Pope. The Prince of Wales and his evil bar codes.” I was trying to sound jokey, but Ben didn’t smile.

“The Muslims call him Dajjal? He’s got one eye? He gets killed by Jesus in this massive battle at the gates of Lydda?” There were beads of sweat on his forehead.

“Ben, it’s all…” The word on my lips was ‘rubbish’, but I held back.

“I know you don’t believe in it, Mum. I’m not gonna argue about it, all right? I’m not even sure I believe all of it myself. But I know there’s something in it. I just know. Like, I can feel it coming?”

If Only It Came In Tubes

Heavy as watermelons

I
walked round to Canaan House the next day, hoping to have a chance to speak to Mr Ali. I wanted to ask him about Lydda. After my unsettling talk with Ben last night, I’d logged on to the internet to look up information about the prophecies relating to Lydda. This story—1 wasn’t sure where it was leading me, but now, because of Ben, it had become my story, too, and I knew I had to follow it through.

The sun was shining for once, a hard clear brightness, with even a touch of warmth, and I could smell the trees and shrubs catching their silky breaths as if taken by surprise: this is it at last—a real spring day. Around the margins of the lawn, daffodils were poking their yellow heads up between the cut-back loops of bramble that had already started to regrow. Mr Ali was there, standing up on a ladder painting the outside of Mrs Shapiro’s bedroom window, singing wordlessly to himself. Wonder Boy was supervising him, sitting on one of the white UPVC chairs in the garden with his tail wrapped round his legs.

“Hello, Mr Ali!” I called. “Is everything okay?”

He came back down the ladder wiping his hands on a piece of cloth from the pocket of his blue nylon overall.

“Hello, Mrs George. Nice day!”

Actually, I realised that Wonder Boy wasn’t supervising Mr Ali at all; he was supervising a couple of thrushes which were hard at work building their nest among a thicket of ivy in one of the ash trees. I watched them come and go with their bits of moss and dry grass. Wonder Boy was watching too, flicking the tip of his tail.

“Tomorrow I borrow the van, we take Mrs Shapiro to choose a colour of paint for inside.”

“That’s good.”

“How is your son?”

“He’s OK, But…” I hesitated. An image of Ben slipped into my mind, his waxy face, the fear in his eyes. He’d gone off to bed last night without eating anything. I’d knocked on the door of his room, but it was locked from the inside. I was beginning to doubt whether this was normal teenage behaviour, something he would grow out of.

“Mr Ali, that picture in the hall—of Lydda. Was it you who took it down?”

“Lydda.” He stuck his paintbrush in a pot of turpentine and swirled it around. “In the old times this town was famous for its beautiful mosques. But do you know, Mrs George, that this town is a special place to you also? Is home town of your Christian Saint George. You are named from him, I think?”

I didn’t want to admit that in fact I’d been named after George Lansbury. It was Dad’s idea, and Mum hadn’t been able to think of a suitably inspirational female socialist icon to suggest instead.

“Really? Saint George the dragon slayer came from Lydda?”

“You can see his picture carved above the door of the church.”

Sweet Saint Georgina. I recalled Mark Diabello’s poem with a shudder. But Ben had also talked about a one-eyed devil.

“The picture of Lydda that was in the hallway, why did you take it down, Mr Ali?”

“Why you are always asking questions, Mrs George?” He wasn’t exactly being rude, but the easy friendliness of our previous conversation had gone. “Everything is okay. Sun is shining. I am working. Everybody is happy. Now you start asking questions, and if I tell you the truth you will not be happy.”

“You were going to tell me about your family, remember? What happened in Lydda?”

He didn’t say anything. He was concentrating on cleaning his brushes. Then he pulled up one of the white plastic chairs and sat down at the table. Wonder Boy had slunk off; I saw him sitting directly beneath the thrushes’ tree, staring up into the branches. I shooed him away and sat myself down opposite Mr Ali. He put aside the brushes, poured some of the turpentine on to his hands, rubbed them together and wiped them on a piece of cloth.

“You want to know? Okay. I will tell you, Mrs George.” He put the cloth back in his pocket and folded his arms across his XXL tummy. “I come from Lydda. I had one brother, born the same time.”

“A twin?”

“If you will please stop interruption, I will tell you.”

Mustafa al-Ali, the man I knew as Mr Ali, was bom in Lydda in 1948—this much he knew. He didn’t know his mother’s name, nor that of his twin brother, nor even his exact date of birth, but he reckons he was a few months old on nth July 1948.

“Why, what happened then?”

“Have patience. I will tell you.”

Lydda was at that time a busy town of some 20,000 inhabitants that had grown up over centuries in the fertile coastal plain between the mountains of Judaea and the Mediterranean sea. But that summer, the summer of Nakba, the town was filled up with refugees from Jaffa and smaller towns and villages all up the coast. “You can imagine how everybody was jittering, talking about expulsions and massacres.”

One late morning in July, when everything was hot and still, and even cats and sparrows had gone off to look for shade, there was a sudden roar of engines overhead. People who looked up saw a flight of planes swoop low out of the glimmering sky. Then the explosions started. One after the other after the other, as the planes began unloading their bombs on the sleepy little town. Houses, shops, mosques, market stalls. One after the other after the other. There was nowhere to flee to. No bomb shelters. No anti-aircraft guns. People just scurried around like frenzied ants. Some caught a blast and fell in the street. Some died when rubble collapsed on them. Some sat tight in a corner and covered their heads and prayed.

“But their purpose mainly was not to kill,” Mr Ali continued, fixing me with his eyes. “They wanted to drive us out, with terror.”

Next day, as people were emerging from the rubble to inspect the damage and bury their dead, a battalion with mounted machine guns suddenly rolled into town at high speed. At first they thought it was the Jordanian army, come to defend them, but all at once the machine guns let rip, barrels blazing, bullets flying in all directions. Men, women and children were gunned down—some 200 fell and died in the streets. Others fled in fright.

“You can read it on your internet, Mrs George. How it was reported in American newspapers. Blitzkrieg. Ruthlessly brilliant. Corpses riddled with bullets by roadside. All this was done to create terror. This is how they emptied Lydda of its population.”

Some tried to take safety in the great Dahmash Mosque.

But later that night, the people who lived nearby heard round after round of gunfire coming from the building. Next day 176 bodies were found inside.

As dawn broke, soldiers ran from house to house, banging on the doors with their rifle butts and ordering those inside to leave at once.

“Go! Go to King Abdullah!” the soldiers shouted. What they mean is—get out of this country, and leave it for us! Go to Jordan! Flee to any Arab country that will take you! You never heard about this?”

I shook my head. “Go on.”

The terrified population, expelled from their homes, grabbed what they could and fled. The al-Ali family—the women and children, for their father had disappeared—were dragged out of their house on to the street, given only a few minutes to grab their valuables. Soldiers were herding everyone out into the streets, shoving them with the barrels of their guns if they were too slow, shooting them if they resisted.

“Where are we going?” the mother had asked, grabbing her children to her in all the chaos.

Someone had said, “They’re taking us to Jordan,” and someone else had said, “We’re going to Ramallah.”

They were marched to the outskirts of the town, the soldiers firing shots in the air to make them run.

“Go! Run to Abdullah in Jordan!”