2009 - We Are All Made of Glue (7 page)

I hunted around and found a dozen cat-food tins in a cupboard. I spooned some out into a bowl for Violetta and she wolfed it down, almost choking in her desperation. Then I unlocked the back door—the key was on the inside—filled the bowl, and put it out on the step. Wonder Boy appeared, hissed at Violetta, batted her out of the way, and polished it off. A few other scrawny moggies were hanging around too. I fed them all—there must have been a good half-dozen of them, miaowing and rubbing themselves against me. A couple of them sneaked indoors between my legs. I locked the kitchen door and returned to the house.

The bureau Mrs Shapiro had been talking about was in a downstairs room which could have been a study. The window had been boarded up behind drawn curtains, so the only light was from a lone surviving candle-bulb in the heavy gilt candelabra that cast a feeble glow over the old-fashioned floral wallpaper, floor-to-ceiling bookcases, Persian rugs, and a tiled fireplace above which an ornate ormolu mirror would have reflected the blocked-out view over the garden. Even in the gloomy light I could see it was a lovely room. The smell was different, too, musky and dusty, with only a faint trace of cat pee. There was a spoon back armchair and two desks—a mahogany kneehole desk by the window, and a tall oak bureau-bookcase in an alcove beside the chimney breast.

I decided to start here. I have to confess that, even then, Ms Firestorm was looking over my shoulder and whispering in my ear, there must be a story here—maybe a better story than
The Splattered Heart
.

The bureau was full of papers, mostly bills in the name of Naomi Shapiro, and some, the older ones, in the name of Artem Shapiro, and bank statements from a joint-name account. The most recent of these, to my astonishment, showed a balance of just over £3,000. The oldest I could find dated back to 1948. There was, it seemed, a small monthly income from an annuity, as well as Mrs Shapiro’s widow’s pension going into the bank. I took a selection of statements at random; would these give the hospital the information they needed? In the same drawer, held together with a rubber band, was a bundle of receipts including one for £25, dated 26
th
October from Felicity NU2U Dress Agency, and one dated i6
th
October for £23 from P. Cochrane, Antique and Secondhand Emporium, New North Road. That explained the pram.

There must be something else, I thought, something personal to show a date or place of birth, of baptism or marriage, education or employment. You can’t live a whole life that’s only recorded through bills and receipts. The kneehole desk was crammed full of stationery, crumpled notepaper, dried up pens and stubs of pencils, receipts, old tickets, train timetables years out of date, a library card, also out of date, and assorted out-of-date leaflets about pensions and benefits: the useless bits of officialdom we cart with us through life. One drawer housed a correspondence with the Council about the monkey puzzle tree, which Mrs Shapiro had wanted to cut down, although apparently it had a tree preservation order on it.

In the last drawer there was a thick brown envelope stuffed with official-looking papers. This was what I’d been searching for. An odd-looking passport, light blue with a black stripe on one corner. Artem Shapiro; date of birth i3th March 1904; place of birth Orsha; date of issue 4
th
March 1950, London. Ration book: Artem Shapiro 1947. Driving licence: Artem Shapiro 1948. Abbey National Life Insurance plan, Artem Shapiro 1958. Death certificate: Artem Shapiro 1960; cause of death: cancer of the lung. Knowing his story, I felt a special tug of intimacy as I turned the flimsy typewritten paper over in my hands. So that was how his journey ended: the ghetto, the barbed-wire camp, the silent forests, the ice-bound lake. I folded the death certificate and put it back, hoping he’d died in his sleep, cosseted with morphine.

But what about her? A Co-op savings book was the only document that had her name on it. Mrs N. Shapiro rjth July 1972. There has to be something else, I thought; and I remembered what she’d said—
you only look in bureau
. So if anything had been deliberately hidden, I wouldn’t find it here.

In a frenzy of curiosity, I poked through the other rooms. The sideboard in the dining room where I’d eaten the death-defying fish dinner yielded nothing but plates and cutlery. The sitting room was dark, the windows boarded up, and the light switch didn’t work. I’d need a torch to search in here. Under the staircase, behind the pram, a narrow door opened on to a stone stair leading down to the basement. A wave of trapped musty air rose up towards me. I felt with my hand along the wall for the light switch, and a fluorescent strip light juddered into life, flickering madly on and off, plunging the low-ceilinged room alternately into light and pitch darkness.

It seemed to be some kind of workshop. A glass-fronted cabinet was fixed to the wall with rows of tools neatly arranged, the blades now tarnished with rust. Below it was a workbench with a variety of clamps. Bits of strangely carved wood were hanging from hooks. I realised after a few moments that they were panels and necks of unfinished violins. There was a pot of dried-up glue, a small dried-up brush sticking out of it. The glue was clear and amber-coloured, still exuding a faint sickly whiff. Animal glue. Bio-polymer. Used for woodworking, veneers and inlays, until better modern synthetic glues came along.

My boss Nathan once told me that the Nazis had made glue from human bones. Lampshades from human skin; mattresses stuffed with human hair. Nothing wasted. I was beginning to feel dizzy. Maybe it was the strobe effect of the faulty fluorescent tube, or the memories trapped in the ghost-breathed air.

I made my way back up the stone stairs. As my fingers felt for the light switch I turned back towards the workshop, and that’s when I saw a flash of colour on top of the tool cabinet—a couple of millimetres of blue just visible above the architrave. Curious, I went back down and pulled up a chair to have a look. It was an oblong tin, a bit rusty, with a picture of Harlech Castle surrounded by an improbably blue Welsh sky. I lifted it down and eased it open. It was the sort of tin that would once have held toffees or shortbread biscuits, but all it had in it now was a few photographs. I slipped it under my arm and went back up into the light.

From the hall, a wide staircase with a curved mahogany banister led up to the first floor. As I mounted the treads, still clutching the tin, a threadbare Axminster carpet secured by brass rods released clouds of dust under my feet. The same mahogany handrail galleried the first-floor landing, and nine doors opened off it. One of them was slightly ajar. I pushed it open. A scurry of movement. Two lean stray cats bolted out between my legs. The room was large and light, with a double window overlooking the front garden, and dominated by a massive art-deco walnut double bed on which a tattered-eared tomcat—he had the same moth-eaten look as Mrs Shapiro’s astrakhan coat—was curled up asleep. Raising his shaggy head he followed me with his eyes as I came in. The stench in here was terrible. Phew! I opened a window. “Shoo! Shoo! Piss off!” I tried to chase him out but he just looked at me with contempt. Eventually he uncurled himself, jumped down from the bed flicking his tail grumpily from side to side, and sauntered towards the door.

This, I guessed, was Mrs Shapiro’s bedroom, for her clothes were scattered everywhere—the Scotch plaid baker boy cap, the peep-toe high heels, and on the floor by the bed a pair of peach camiknickers trimmed with cream lace, a faint stain yellowing the silk. The walnut wardrobe, carved with art-deco sunbursts, was full of clothes on satin-padded hangers, reeking of moth-balls, stylish and expensive like costumes in a Humphrey Bogart movie. A matching sunburst dressing table stood in one corner, with a triple hinged mirror facing the window through which I had a view of the garden. I rifled through layers of ancient decomposing make-up and musty, slightly stinky underwear. There was nothing of interest, so I sat down on the edge of the bed, opened the Harlech Castle tin, and spread out the six photographs.

Most were in black and white, but the top one was in sepia, creased and tattered at the edges. It was a family portrait from the turn of the century: the mother in a lace-collared dress cradling a baby, the other arm round the shoulder of the father with a beard and a tall hat, and two children, a little girl wearing a flouncy dress and a strikingly blond toddler in white pantaloons and an embroidered shirt. There was writing on the back that didn’t seem to make sense. Until I realised it was in Cyrillic script. All I could make out was the date: 1905. He must have carried it with him, hidden in a pocket or a lining, all that way.

Next, a wedding photograph caught my eye: a tall man, fair and handsome, grasping the hand of a pretty woman with ardent eyes and thick curly black hair pinned up beneath a crown of white blossom. They were gazing out of the photograph, wide-eyed, half smiling, as though taken by surprise at their own happiness. The man I recognised as Artem Shapiro. But who was the woman? An attractive heart-shaped face with wide-set dark eyes and a full, generous mouth. I studied it carefully, for people’s faces do change as they age, but, really, there could be no doubt. The woman in the photo was not Naomi Shapiro.

I was still staring at the photo when suddenly I heard a sound outside in the garden—voices, and the clack of the gate. My heart thumped. Quickly I slipped the photos into my bag, closed the tin and shoved it on top of the wardrobe out of sight. In one of the panes of the triple mirror I could see a reflection of the window and, through it, the garden. A man and a woman were standing on the path; they were standing and gazing at the house. The woman was a stout redhead, wearing a vivid green jacket; the man was stocky and red-cheeked, wearing a blue parka, smoking a cigarette. The man stubbed his cigarette out on the path and spoke to the woman. I couldn’t catch his words, but I saw her toothy laugh. By the time I came down to the door they’d gone.

Rubber

T
here was a different nurse on duty when I went back up to the hospital next time. She examined the papers I showed her without comment, ticked a box on Mrs Shapiro’s notes, and passed them back to me.

“How’s she doing?” I asked.

“Fine. She’ll be ready to go as soon as we can get her home assessment done.” She flicked through the notes. “I understand you have the key to her house. I’ll get Mrs Goodknee to ring you for an appointment.”

Mrs Goodknee again. I imagined someone in a miniskirt with chubby dimpled knees.

Mrs Shapiro was sitting up in bed, her hair combed back tidily, the hospital nightgown, antiseptic green, buttoned up to her throat. She seemed well; the stay in hospital had fattened her up. Her cheeks were rosy and her eyes looked bluer—yes, her eyes were definitely blue.

“Hello. You look good, Mrs Shapiro. Are they feeding you well? Are they still making you eat sausages?”

“Not sossedge. Now is better. Now is chickens and fry pottetto. Did you bring the Wonder Boy?”

“I tried, but he ran away,” I lied.

I wanted to ask her about the photographs, but I held back because I didn’t want to admit that I’d been rifling through her house and had discovered the hidden tin. I would have to find another way of worming the story out of her.

We sipped the thick, bitter tea that came around on the trolley and munched our way through the box of chocolates I’d brought in my role as next of kin.

“Mrs Shapiro, I’m worried that your house is…well…don’t you think it’s a bit big for you to manage? Wouldn’t you be happier in a nice cosy flat? Or in a home where you’d have someone to look after you?”

She looked at me with wide-eyed horror, as though I’d put a curse on her.

“Why for you say this to me, Georgine?”

I couldn’t find polite words to explain my concern about the smell and the grunge and the crumbling fabric of the house, so I just said, “Mrs Shapiro, the nurse thinks you might be too old to live on your own.” I studied her face. “She told me you’re ninety-six.”

Her mouth twitched. She blinked. “I am not going nowhere.”

“Mrs Shapiro, how old are you really?”

She ignored my question.

“What would heppen to my dear cats?” A stubborn look had come over her. “How is the Wonder Boy? Next time you must bring him.”

I told her about Wonder Boy’s starling—“That notty boy!”—and Violetta’s plaintive mewing—“Ach! Always she is singing
La Traviatal”—and
the cat that sneaked upstairs to sleep on her bed. “That is Mussorgsky. Maybe it is my fault, I allow it. Darlink, sometimes I am so lonely in the night.”

She glanced at me, and my face must have given something away, because she said, “You also are lonely, Georgine, are you? I can see in your eyes.”

I nodded reluctantly. I was the one who was supposed to be asking the questions. But she squeezed my hand. “So, tell me about your husband—the one who was running away.”

“Oh, it’s a long story.”

“But not so long as mine, isn’t it?” An impish smile. “It was a story of loff at first sight?”

“Actually, it was, Mrs Shapiro. Our eyes met across a crowded room.”

§

In fact it was a courtroom in Leeds, where two miners from Castleford were on trial for a picket-line scuffle. Rip was defending; he was still doing his articles and volunteering at the Chapeltown Law Centre. I was a junior reporter on the
Evening Post
. After the verdict was announced—they were cleared—we went for a celebratory drink. Later Rip drove me home to my parents’ bungalow in Kippax, and we made love in front of the fire. I remembered how I’d teased him about his name.

Me: (Twisting my fingers into his curls.) Knock knock.

Him: (Fumbling with my bra, his mouth wet on my ear.) Who’s there?

Me: (Pulling him down on top of me.) Euripides.

Him: (Hand up my skirt.) Euripides who?

Me: (Giggling between kisses.) You rippe dese knickers off…

§

So he did. It was strange, because we hardly knew each other, yet it was as if we’d known each other for ever.

“And your parents, what did they say? They were a little surprised, isn’t it?”