2009 - We Are All Made of Glue

by Marina Lewycka

  It was time to break for lunch. I wandered over to investigate the fridge. There were two eggs, a slice of bread and the remains of a supermarket bag of rocket salad. In the door was an opened bottle of Rioja. Should I? Shouldn’t I?

  I was trying to decide, when the doorbell rang. Mark Diabello was standing on the doorstep with a bottle of champagne in his hand. It wasn’t just any old supermarket champagne, either, it was Bollinger. Maybe it was just a trick of the light, but I could swear his eyes were smouldering. Deep sea-green, with flickers of obsidian and gold. Something in my heart did a funny little skip.

  “A token of appreciation for a valued client,” he murmured.

  “I’m not your client.”

  “But you could be.”

  “I don’t think so. But come in.”

  I went and fetched two wine glasses from the kitchen. I didn’t have proper champagne flutes. We clinked.

  “I like you, Georgina. You’re different.”

  The smile-creases in his cheeks quickened. My heart did that wayward skip again.

  “Have you come to offer me a more focused view of your services?”

  “Would you like that?”

  I didn’t say yes. But I didn’t say no.

  We ended up in my bedroom. He led the way. Of course, he was an estate agent, he knew where to go. It all happened astonishingly fast, with the well-oiled precision of a top-of-the-range Jaguar. He gave me just the right amount of champagne, kissed me in just the right way, holding me firmly but carefully under the chin. Then at exactly the right moment one hand moved down from my chin to my left breast. The other worked its way up between my legs. There was something reassuringly impersonal about it all. His hands found their way unerringly to the right places. His fingers were strong and supple. There was no fumbling with clothes—they just fell away. His body was hard and hairy. He produced a condom from his pocket. If I’d had time to think, I might have thought—what the hell am I doing? But I didn’t think about anything. My brain was full of bubbles. My skin tingled like electricity. My body purred in his hands. I’d like to say I recoiled in disgust at the sheer efficiency of it. But actually, it was fantastic.

  I can’t remember what happened next—well, okay, I can, but I’m too embarrassed to write it down. Look, he was the only man apart from Rip I’d slept with in twenty years. It was as though I’d slipped out of my familiar skin and become a different person, someone whose body waved and fluttered like a piece of silk in a storm.

  Afterwards we lay together watching the shadows lengthen in the garden and he pulled me into his arms and stroked my hair, murmuring sweet meaningless words. Then he reached into the breast pocket of his jacket, which was hanging on the back of the chair, and passed me a clean white handkerchief.

  We didn’t talk much. It wasn’t about us as people. He left before Ben got back from school. I thought I might feel dirty, or used, or disgusted with myself, but I guess I realised deep down that having sex with someone else was part of a sticky repair process I had to go through. What was it Nathan had said? You get better bonding with glue and a screw. Maybe there’s something in that. After he’d gone, all I felt was a great mass of melancholy like a rain cloud swelling over my heart. I didn’t want him to see me cry, but as I heard his Jag pull away I let the tears come. I couldn’t even have said why I was crying, or what it was that had stirred up such a storm in me. Maybe the sex had just loosened me up so there was no rigidity to hold back the tears.

  §

  About half an hour later, I heard the door-click of Ben letting himself in. I dried my eyes, pulled my clothes on, and went down to greet him.

  “You okay, Mum?” He looked at me intently. “You seem a bit sort of…weird.”

  The scrambled eggs were still on the kitchen table, yellow and congealed.

  “Weird in what way?”

  “Sort of hyper. Hyper-manic.”

  “It must be all the coffee I’ve been drinking. I’m having a sticky patch with Adhesives. Ha ha. How about you? How’s life in…” (I censored a number of sarcastic epithets.) “…Islington?”

  “It’s okay. Dad’s a bit hyper, too.”

  He poured the milk over the Choco-Puffs and sat down with his spoon.

  “Oh, is he?”

  I craved these snippets of information, but loyal Ben handed them out very sparingly.

  “He says he’s starting a new project?”

  There was that rising inflection in his speech again. I found it troubling. It didn’t sound like my Ben.

  “Not the Progress Project?”

  “He says it’s progressing to a higher level?”

  “Yes, he’s always had high aspirations.”

  A sarcastic note must have crept into my voice. Ben’s look warned me that I was in danger of transgressing the subtle boundaries he’d drawn up between his two worlds.

  That night, after Ben had gone to bed, I poured myself a glass of wine and reached for my exercise book. They were banqueting again at Holty Towers.

  The Splattered Heart

  Chapter 6

  Spurned by her errant husband, heartbroken Gina at last found love fulfilment consolation in the arms of an itinerant mandolin player with obsidian cerulean sapphire amethyst jade lapis lazuli eyes. (Thanks Mr Roget.) He brought her beautiful gifts—hand-embroidered Spanish underwear garters hankies mantillas.

  §

  As I closed up my exercise book an hour later, I realised that the wine bottle was empty, and I’d opened another one. This was no good. Maybe Ben was right—I should go easy on the Rioja. The house was full of silence. I listened. Faintly, I could hear a car passing on the road and the tick-tick-tick of the water in the radiators. That was all. Holty Towers, the ecstasy and drama, the sumptuous meals and mandolin music, was a world away.

  24

  Experimenting with Velcro

  Mark Diabello came back again next Wednesday, this time without the champagne, but with a bunch of flowers—red roses—and a small gift-wrapped box, which I took to be chocolates. I was waiting for him, wearing a rather revealing top, which I’d bought the day before, and some lacy panties under a sleek clinging skirt, which I’d also bought the day before. I caught sight of myself in the hall mirror, my flushed cheeks and brilliant eyes, and didn’t recognise myself. I could feel myself starting to melt as he kissed me. It took us about five minutes to get from the doorstep to the bedroom.

  He was already undressing me as we fell on to the bed, his hands working with the same target-driven efficiency. When his shirt came off I could smell his body, soapy, sweaty, musky, and another smell, faintly chemical and disconcerting. What was it? I pressed my face to his skin. Sulphur? Chlorine. And in a flash I was sixteen years old, back in the locker room at the International Pool in Leeds, locked in a cubicle with Gavin Connolly, locked in his arms, lost in love.

  “Have you been swimming?”

  “How can you tell?”

  “You smell of chlorine.”

  “Don’t you like it?”

  “I do like it. A lot.”

  “I’m a diver. High board”

  “That must be so terrifying!”

  “It is. You just have to shut your eyes and plunge.”

  I imagined him, hard and lean and straight as a pike, hurtling into the water. I shut my eyes and plunged.

  “Aren’t you going to open your present?” he murmured.

  I reached for the little box that had slipped down at the side of the bed, and pulled the ribbon off. Something red and silky slipped out. I held it up. It was a tiny pair of panties, shiny red satin, trimmed with black lace. I stared. Blimey! Were they for me? I’d never owned anything like this before. I wasn’t even sure I liked them.

  “Aren’t you going to put them on?”

  I wriggled into them and felt them flutter like moth’s wings against my thighs. There was something odd about them—the gusset—it was open. Surely that defeated the whole purpose…? What’s the point of panties without a gus
set?

  She soon found out. Not me, not Georgie Sinclair, no, it was a different woman—someone sexy and shameless who frolicked around in red satin panties trimmed with black lace and an opening in the gusset, who smelled of sex, whose body melted like warm sugar in the arms of a dark handsome stranger who appeared on her doorstep and made love to her one afternoon.

  The dark handsome stranger lay with the sexy woman, carrying his weight on one elbow. His other hand was exploring the opening in the gusset. She could smell the chlorine on his skin.

  “Look, there’s something else in the box,” he said.

  The sexy woman fumbled shamelessly in the box and pulled out—what the hell were they? Two loops of red padded satin trimmed with black lace. Garters? No, there was a Velcro fastening.

  “You naughty little slag,” he whispered. “Let me…”

  He leaned over her and fastened her wrists to the bedhead, pressing down on her, pressing all the breath out of her till she had to cry out. She came almost at once, before he’d even entered her.

  It was warm and steamy in the locker room, and we were wet and slippery, and then we towelled each other dry and got into our damp chlorine-sticky clothes. What had happened to Gavin Connolly? What had happened to Georgie Shutworth? I couldn’t help myself-1 started to cry. Mark Diabello dabbed my eyes with his hanky and kissed me lingeringly on my throat and neck.

  “You’re a very beautiful woman, Georgina. Has anyone ever told you that?”

  I wanted to believe him. I almost believed him; but a cool whisper in my head reminded me that he probably slept with dozens of women, and said that to all of them. Then something from another age stirred in my mind, Rip’s voice, husky against my cheek: “If ever any beauty I did see, which I desired and got, ‘twas but a dream of thee.” How long ago was that?

  “You’d better go now. It’s nearly four o’clock.”

  “What happens at four o’clock? D’you turn into a pumpkin?”

  “No, I turn into a mother.”

  §

  Just after four, the key turned in the latch, and I did turn into a mother.

  “Hi, Mum.”

  Ben flung his bag down and let me hug him, turning his head to one side. He looked tense and pale.

  “Everything okay?”

  “Fine. Cool.”

  He wasn’t looking at me. His eyes were fixed on the window.

  “Do you want a sandwich? Some Choco-Puffs?”

  “Nah. I’ll just have water.”

  He drank resting both elbows on the table, his brown curls falling across his eyes.

  “I’ve been feeling a bit sort of…weird.”

  I kicked Mr Diabello right out of my mind and sat down opposite him.

  “How do you mean, weird?”

  “I’ve been having these weird feelings.”

  I could feel my pulses starting to pound, but I kept my voice soft and easy.

  “What feelings, Ben?”

  “Sort of…liminal.”

  “Liminal?”

  I had no idea what he was talking about. I waited, listening.

  “Like we’re living in liminal times. You can see it in the light, Mum—look—it’s like it’s seeping in from the edges of another world.”

  He pointed at the window. I looked round. Between the houses, a low shaft of pinky sunlight was lighting up a bank of purple cumulus from below. The brick buildings and leafless trees were all backlit, cast in shadow, despite the vivid light. I could see what he meant—it did look unearthly.

  “It’s winter, Ben. The sun’s always low in the sky at this time of year. Further north, in Scandinavia, they don’t have any daytime at all.”

  He looked up with a flicker of a smile.

  “You’re so literal-minded, Mum.”

  The clouds rearranged themselves and the shaft of light disappeared, but still there was a fiery glow on the underbelly of the sky.

  “I keep having these feelings, like the world’s going to end soon.” He paused, gulping a mouthful of water. “Like we’re coming to the end of time?”

  “Ben, you should have said…”

  “So I Googled End of Time. And that’s when I realised it wasn’t just me?”

  That’s what they do, his generation, I thought. They don’t talk to their parents or friends like we did—they look on the internet.

  “There’s like all these signs—predictions in the Bible about the end of time? Wars, earthquakes, floods, plagues and that—it’s all starting to come true?” His voice was strained and crackly.

  “But you don’t believe all that stuff about prophecies, do you, Ben?”

  “No, but…well, yes…I just think, like, if that many people believe it, there could be something in it?”

  “But those things—wars, earthquakes, floods, plagues—they’ve been happening since the beginning of recorded history.”

  “Yeah, I know, but it’s all speeded up now. Floods and earthquakes—like there’s one every year. And AIDS, SARS, avian flu—all these new diseases. It’s all started coming true. Like in the Bible, it’s predicted the Jews’ll return to Israel, and they did. You know, in 1948. After the Holocaust and that? That was the beginning of all the wars in the Middle East. The invasion of Lebanon. You can read it for yourself, Mum—it’s all there in the Bible. And it’s not just Jews and Christians? A lot of Muslims think their great prophet is coming? Like they call him the Last Imam?” The rising inflection in his voice seemed to challenge me to disagree.

  How could I explain without sounding pompous that just because millions of people believe something doesn’t make it true.

  “Why didn’t you tell me, Ben, that you were having these feelings? Or Rip?”

  “I thought you’d think it was mad? You wouldn’t listen? You and Dad—you never listen to anybody.” He dropped his voice to a mumble. “Like, you’re so sure you know everything already?”

  He didn’t say it as an accusation, but it stung like one. We were so preoccupied with our own lives and problems that we’d failed to hear our own son’s cry for help.

  “I’m sorry, Ben. You’re right—we don’t always listen. D’you want to talk about it now?”

  “Nah, it’s all right, Mum.” He grinned sheepishly, swallowing the rest of his water. “I feel all right now. I think I’ll have some Choco-Puffs.”

  After he’d gone upstairs, I sat in the kitchen with a glass of wine wondering where we’d gone wrong. We’d brought him up to respect difference—diversity. To disrespect someone’s faith would cause offence. At his primary school in Leeds, Rip and I, like good middle-class parents, had cheered enthusiastically as the children celebrated Christmas and Eid and Diwali. All belief was equally valid. Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Judaism, astrology, astronomy, relativity, evolution, creationism, socialism, monetarism, global warming, damage to the ozone layer, crystal healing, Darwin, Hawking, Dawkins, Nostradamus, Mystic Meg, they were all out there vying with each other in the marketplace of ideas. How was anyone to know which was true and which wasn’t?

  25

  The attraction between adhesives and adherends

  Sometime in the night it started to snow. When I pulled back my curtains in the morning everything was white, and I felt a sudden burst of happiness, like I’d felt as a child waking up on a snowy day. No school; snowball fights with my brother; tobogganing on a tea tray down the slag heaps. In those days, before the invention of four-wheel drives and working online, snow meant holiday, anarchy, delight.

  In the garden, even the horrible yellow-spotted laurel bush was touched with magic, the leaves and branches bowing gracefully under their overcoat of snow. I noticed a movement—it seemed like three small black creatures hopping along, then I realised they were black feet attached to a white body. Wonder Boy prowled along the edge of the garden, tiptoed across the lawn, and took up his position under the laurel tree, staring up at the house. He was reminding me, I should drop in on Mrs Shapiro today.

  “Look, Ben,” I
said, when he came down for breakfast. “It’s snowing. You could take the day off school.”

  “It’s okay, Mum. I feel better today. I’ve got to work on my technology project. The bus’ll be running.”

  How did he get to be so sensible? I hugged him.

  “Take care.”

  After he’d left, I sat down and tried to concentrate on an article for Adhesives. “The attraction between surfaces in adhesive bonding.”

  “Powerful attractive forces develop between the adhesive and the adherend which may be adsorptive, electrostatic or diffusive.”

  There was something quite romantic, I was thinking, about those gluey time-enduring forces, bonds so strong that they could outlive the materials themselves.

  Mmm. My mind started to drift. It was no good. Adhesives would have to wait—I wanted to get outside before the snow disappeared.

  I phoned Mrs Shapiro, to see whether she needed anything from the shops. There was no reply, so I pulled on my wellies and my coat and went out anyway. The sun was low but brilliant, dusting every white surface with a sparkle of gold, but the snow had already started to melt and there were mini-avalanches all around as it slipped off roofs and branches. Wonder Boy followed me down the road. I lobbed a snowball at him, but he ducked out of the way.

  When I got to Canaan House, I saw that the snow had pulled an end of the gutter down, and melting snow was dripping down the porch. Maybe I would have to get Mr. Ali in again. There were footprints in the snow leading away from the house. I knocked on the door just in case but I wasn’t surprised that there was no reply. She must have gone out already. Wonder Boy trotted up the path, sat down in the porch and started to yowl.

  “What’s the matter?”

  I reached down to stroke him, but he hissed and went for me with his claws. I gave him a kick with my welly and went off to do my shopping. Later in the afternoon I phoned Mrs Shapiro again. Still no reply. This was odd. I began to get worried. Why had she gone out so early in the snow? Then Ben came back from school and I got on with cooking supper. I’ll ring later, I thought.