2009 - We Are All Made of Glue (3 page)

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.

Bonding dissimilar materials

W
hen I got home, I put the kettle on for a cup of tea and phoned 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?”

I knew she secretly hoped we would get together again. I didn’t tell her he’d been round to pick up his stuff.

When Rip and I first fell in love, I sometimes used to imagine us as romantic characters in a great tempestuous love story set against the turbulent background of the miners’ strike, transgressing boundaries of wealth and class to be together. I was his door into an exotic world where noble savages discussed socialism while soaping each other’s backs in t’ pit baths. He was my door into Pemberley Hall and Mansfield Park. We were so full of illusions about each other, maybe it was bound to end in a splattering.

After Mum had rung off, I made another cup of tea and picked up my pen.

It was a sunny October day, and Rip-ck’s mind was on carnal things as his
mini
Porsche
nosed its way
roared up over the
Roaches
hills still brilliant with dazzling autumn colour. After a few miles
after Leek
…(Should I change the location as well as the names? I tried to cast my mind back to my journalism course with frisky Mrs Featherstone, but I couldn’t for the life of me remember what she’d said about libel.)…the road turned sharply to the right, and Gina saw the entrance to a driveway, with a cattle grid and two stone gateposts, and there at the bottom of the valley, a good mile away, was
Ho⁄thorn House
Holty Towers, sailing like a stone galleon in a shimmering red-green-and-gold sea. (Pause for admiration; that was good—the galleon bit.) Despite herself, Gina
was impressed by
found herself inexorably drawn towards the
house
stately pile and she could not help noticing
that these people obviously hod a bob or two
the stunning period features. So this is how the other half live, she thought.
Actually, she found it quite appealing.
How disgusting
.

§

In fact Rip was always much less troubled by the differences between our two families than I was.

§

Me: (Whisper.) You never told me they were so posh.

Him: (Murmur.) But when you have money, you realise how little it really matters.

Me: (Loud whisper.) Yes, but it matters if you haven’t got enough.

Him: (Quietly confident.) Inequality only matters if it makes people
feel
unequal.

Me: Yes, but…(But that’s a load of crap.)

Him: You don’t feel unequal, do you, Georgie?

Me: No, but…(of course I bloody do. I don’t know what to do with all the knives and forks. I feel as though they look down their hoity-toity noses at me. But I can’t admit it, can I, without seeming like a complete loser? So I’d better keep my mouth shut.)

Him: Mmm. (Kisses me tenderly on the lips, then we end up in bed. Which is always nice.)

Fish

I
t was already dusk on Saturday evening when I made my way up the lane to Canaan House for my dinner date. As I moved out of range of the spooky sodium glow from the street lamp on Totley Place the shadows closed in on me, and I must admit, I felt a tremor of apprehension. What was I letting myself in for?

The night was cold and starry. The moonlight etched silvery outlines of trees and the gables of Canaan House on to the darkness. But even in that ashy light there was something cheerfully eccentric about its hodgepodge of styles: Victorian bay windows, a Romanesque entrance porch with twirly columns supporting chubby rounded arches, exuberant Tudor chimneys, and a mad Dracula turret with pointed Gothic windows stuck on one side. I wouldn’t go so far as to say I was
inexorably drawn
, but I did quicken my step. The garden path was almost overgrown with brambles but a narrow trail led towards the porch. I pulled my duffel coat around me and looked for signs of light up ahead. Had she forgotten I was coming?

The house itself was dark but I had a sense of eyes watching me. I stopped and listened. I could hear nothing but a faint rustling of leaves that could have been the wind. There was a smell of earth, mouldering vegetation and a musky foxy stink. I took a couple of steps closer to the house, and as I approached the porch a cat burst out of the undergrowth on to the path in front of me. And another. And another. I couldn’t count how many cats there were in that soft lithe seething throng, rubbing up against me, purring and mewing, their eyes glinting gold and green, as if I’d stepped into a teeming shoal of furry fishes.

The front door had a frosted glass panel through which I could now see a faint sliver of light far away inside. There was a bell to one side. I pressed it and heard it ringing somewhere in the depths of the house. The sliver of light widened into a crack and then into a rectangle as a door opened. I heard shuffling footsteps, a safety chain being unlocked, then Mrs Shapiro opened the door.

“Georgine! Darlink! Come in!”

It’s hard to describe the stench that hit me as I stepped over the threshold. I almost gagged and I had to struggle to keep the look of disgust off my face. It was a smell of damp and cat pee and shit and rot and food mould and house filth and sink grunge and, cutting through all that, a rank, nauseating, fishy stink. This last smell, I realised with a sinking feeling, was dinner.

The cats had slunk in beside me—there were only four of them after all—and dashed up ahead into the back of the house. Mrs Shapiro clapped her hands as though to chase them away and smiled indulgently.

“Little pisskes!”

She was wearing a long-sleeved dress in carmine velvet, shaped at the waist and daringly cut away at the front and back to reveal her wrinkled shoulders and the loose skin of her chest. A double string of pearls gleamed around her throat. Her dramatic black curls were piled on top of her head with a collection of tortoiseshell combs, and she’d painted on a dash of matching carmine lipstick—not all of it on her lips. I was still wearing my jeans and a baggy pullover under my brown duffel coat. She stepped back on her high heels and eyed me critically.

“Why you wearing this old shmata, Georgine? Is not fletter-ing for a young woman. You will never get a man this way.”

“I…er…I don’t need…” I stopped. Maybe a man is what I needed after all.

“Come. I will find you something better.”

She led me into the wide tiled entrance hall, from the centre of which a polished mahogany staircase curved away to the next floor. Underneath the staircase were piles of black bin-liner bags, bursting with—I don’t know, really, what they contained, but I could see clothes and books and electrical items and crockery and bedding spilling out where the bags had split. At one side was parked the old high-sprung pram, now apparently full of bundled rags, on which a couple of stripy felines were dozing. She shooed them away and started to root among the bundles. After a few moments she began to tug at a piece of dark green stuff which, when she pulled it out, turned out to be a dress in some heavy silky fabric with long scalloped sleeves.