2009 - We Are All Made of Glue

by Marina Lewycka

  Ancient and inexplicable

  It poured with rain next day, and I sat at my laptop trying to think about adhesives. Bonding. For some reason, my mind kept drifting to Velcro—fascinating stuff. All those sexy little hooks. After a while, I gave up trying to work, put my wellies on, and went round to feed Mrs Shapiro’s cats. They were waiting for me as I approached Canaan House, circling disconsolately out in the rain. The porch where they usually waited was one huge puddle. I looked up and saw that water was now pouring down from the broken gutter I’d first noticed nearly a fortnight ago, and splashing straight into the porch. I fed the cats in the kitchen, and shooed them out through the back door. I noticed Violetta sneaking round the back towards the derelict outhouses, and a few minutes later Mussorgsky slunk off in the same direction. I watched to see whether Wonder Boy would follow, but he was still hanging around for the last scrapings out of the tin. I dished it out slowly, to give the lovers the best chance I could. Then I went home via the Turkish bakery and treated myself to a Danish pastry.

  As soon as I got in I phoned Mr Ali. He was hesitant at first when I described the problem.

  “I am a handyman not a builder. Big ladders needed for this job.”

  But he agreed to take a look. Next, I rang Northmere House. I was annoyed but not surprised to discover that Mrs Shapiro was barred from receiving phone calls as well as visitors. No doubt her mail would be censored, too.

  Fortified by my cup of tea and Danish pastry, I returned to my desk. Adhesives. Bonding. Bondage. Mark Diabello. The trouble was, I caught myself thinking, as I stared at the screen of my laptop, that we didn’t have anything at all in common. Once the initial excitement of sex wore off, I found him—I hadn’t been able to admit this to myself before—a bit, well, boring. Maybe that was the trouble with The Splattered Heart. Those romantic hero types can be limited in their appeal. What I needed was someone I could talk to: someone intellectual; preferably someone hunkily intellectual.

  I’d deleted Nathan’s message without writing down the new deadline. Should I ring him to check? I hesitated. He already thought I was pretty stupid. I pictured him sweeping back his black hair in exasperation from his craggily intelligent brow—he was sitting down at his desk so you couldn’t tell he was rather short. Anyway, size doesn’t matter, does it? I dialled his number.

  “Nathan, I’m sorry, I deleted your message by mistake. What’s the new deadline?”

  He sighed and tutted in a way that suggested he wasn’t really cross.

  “March twenty-fifth. D’you think you’ll be able to have it ready in time, Georgie girl?”

  “I think so. Actually, Nathan,” I lowered my voice, “I keep on getting distracted.”

  “Oh? Anything interesting?” he breathed. I wavered. No, better not mention Velcro.

  “Nathan, have you ever heard of a place called Lydda?”

  “You mean Lydda near Tel Aviv? Where the airport is? They call it Lod nowadays.”

  “See? I remembered you were good on place names.”

  “Are you thinking of going off on holiday? You’d better finish the April Adhesives before you go anywhere,” he added with mock sternness. “The coast’s nice down there. I’ve got some cousins who live at Jaffa.”

  Somehow, it hadn’t registered with me before that Nathan was probably Jewish, too. The thing is, in Kippax, everybody comes from Kippax. Mr Mazzarella who ran the chippie and his wife who ran the ice-cream van were the only exotic people in town.

  “No, I’ve been visiting an elderly Jewish lady who lives near me. She’s got an old photo in her hall of Lydda.” There was silence on the other end of the phone. “I thought it was a person. I didn’t realise it was a place,” I mumbled. “That’s all.”

  “You thought it was a person? Like Georgia?”

  “I told you geography’s not my strong point.”

  Somehow I’d managed to make a complete prat of myself again. But even as I said it, I was thinking—why does Mrs Shapiro have a photo of Lydda?

  “There was a terrorist attack there in the 1972. A bunch of Japanese terrorists gunned down a load of people at the airport. You might have read about it,” said Nathan.

  I searched back through my memory. I would have been twelve years old at the time. Just finding my feet at Garforth Comp. It must have been one of those tragedies in a faraway place that flits across the television screen and vanishes in a day, wringing less grief than the death of Lionheart the school rabbit.

  “What did they do that for?”

  “They were avenging two Palestinian hijackers who’d been gunned down by the Israelis.”

  My mind blanked over. Palestinians and Israelis killing each other—an enmity as ancient and inexplicable as Wonder Boy and Violetta. Somebody else’s problem, not mine.

  29

  The Abomination

  Next morning I waited for a break in the rain to dash across to Canaan House on my feline mercy mission. They were all there, waiting for me, circling and purring. There’s something very nice about getting such a warm furry welcome, even when you know it’s really just the food they want—it isn’t love at all. Maybe the emotions don’t matter—maybe if Rip was just a bit more warm and furry when he talked to me, I thought, I’d be able to cope with the lack of feeling.

  I fed them in the kitchen, then just as I was about to lock up and go home, the rain started again, big heavy drops, presaging a downpour. I could have made a run for it, but getting back to Adhesives just didn’t seem that appealing. I excused myself by thinking I should check the roof for leaks, and made my way up into the attic. Despite the disrepair in the rest of the house, the roof was surprisingly sound. There was a place at the front, more or less above the bay window, where a couple of slates were missing and water was dripping in. I hunted among the junk for a container to catch the drips and found a pretty Victorian chamber pot with a blue-iris design, similar to the pattern in the bathroom.

  In the turret room, the ceiling showed no damp patches. I settled myself into the blue armchair to wait for the rain to pass, and felt round the edges for the baby photo. It was still there. I took it out and studied it. Mrs Sinclair had once said, shortly after Stella was born, that in her opinion all babies were alike. I’d been outraged at the time; but now looking at this crumpled photo of a bald gummy baby, I thought she had a point. Only the lovely dark baby-wide eyes stood out. I gazed back at them, and something from long-ago ‘O’ level Biology popped into my head: the brown-eye gene is dominant; the blue-eye gene is recessive. So this baby must have had at least one brown-eyed parent. Mrs Shapiro’s eyes were blue. And so were Artem Shapiro’s.

  Now my curiosity was truly aroused. With my fingers, I explored the crevice around the edges of the armchair. There was a lot of fluff, cat hair and miscellaneous debris that stuck in my nails. At last, near the left armrest, I came across what felt like paper. It couldn’t have fallen in by accident—it must have been pushed down deliberately—it must have been hidden. With one hand I held back the blue upholstery, and with the other I dug two fingers in deep enough to catch hold of one end and pull it out. It was a letter, concertinaed up, on the same flimsy notepaper as the one I’d found in the piano stool.

  Kefar Daniyyel Lydda, 26th November 1950

  My Dearest Artem,

  I am writing with some wonderful news for you. Our baby was born on 12th November, a little boy. Every day I watch him grow a little more beautiful like his father. Truly he has your face, Arti, but he has my brown eyes. I am often talking to him about his daddy in London, and he smiles and lifts up his little hands in the air, as if he is understanding everything. I have called him Chaim after our great new president Chaim Weizmann. One day your daddy will come here to us I promise to him. Why do you not come, Arti? Why do you not write? Have you forgotten about us?

  We are so eagerly waiting for you, to wrap you up with our love. My dear one the air here is so good and clean after the horrible smogs of London I am sure that your health will b
e improved straightaway. My friend Rachel is expectant also. You cannot imagine how it is good after half a century of death to be surrounded with new life. You will be feeling like at home among these olim who have made aliyah from every corner of the world. Many here at Daniyyel are from Manchester and everyone speaks English, though the big thing now is to learn again our own ancient tongue.

  There is so much of our people’s history in this red earth and in these white stones that are lying across the landscape like the bones of our forebears, sometimes I imagine their spirits sitting beside us on the hillside in the evening to watch the sun going down and the first stars to rise in the east. Finally after so much suffering they are in peace. When the wind whispers over the hilltop it is like the voices of our dead singing their kaddish prayers. Six million souls who have come home. Dear one, I am still remembering our house in Highbury and our happy evenings by the piano, and then my eyes are full of tears. Why do you not write?

  With all my love,

  Naomi

  I read and reread the letter as I sat waiting for the rain to ease off. Then I folded it up and pushed it back down the side of the chair with the photograph. Who was Naomi? She must have been the pretty brown-eyed woman—the mother of the baby. But then who was the old lady in Northmere House? How did the two Naomis fit together?

  The rain showed no sign of easing off: the water streamed down the windows as though someone was playing a hose on them. There was something almost apocalyptic about this never-ending downpour. Was it one of the prophetic signs of the End Times? Ben would probably know. I glanced at my watch. It was three o’clock, almost time for him to be back. In the end, I just resigned myself to getting soaked, and made a dash for home.

  When I got in, I rubbed my hair dry with a towel, put on dry clothes, and guiltily sat down at my laptop. Okay. Concentrate. Glue. “Adhesive curing is the change from a liquid to a solid state.” Sometimes the science of stickiness can be boringly obvious. Maybe it was time to start another novel—a novel about an old lady who lives in a huge crumbling house with seven cats, and a secret. I pushed the dissident thought out of my mind and forced myself to focus. Adhesives in the Modern World was what paid the bills. Something else was niggling at the back of my brain. Ben seemed to be home later than usual.

  When at last I heard his key in the latch, I folded up my laptop and went downstairs to greet him. As I came into the hall, I stopped and caught my breath. I saw a stranger standing there—a bald weirdo who’d broken into my house.

  “Hi, Mum.” He grinned embarrassedly and hung up his wet coat. “Don’t stare like that.”

  “What…?”

  All his hair, his lovely brown curls, had gone. His skull, knobbly and pale, looked obscenely naked.

  “It looks very…”

  He met my eyes. “Don’t say it, Mum.”

  I put my hand over my mouth. We both laughed.

  “D’you want some Choco-Puffs?”

  He shook his head.

  “I don’t know why you always get those for me. Dad gets them, too. I hate them.”

  “I thought you liked them.”

  “I used to. I’ve gone off them now. They taste funny. Sort of metallic?”

  “So what would you like?”

  “S’all right. I’ll get it.”

  He made himself some toast and spread it with peanut butter a centimetre thick, a layer of strawberry jam on top of that, then a sprinkling of chocolate powder. I’d expected him to take it up to his room, but he pulled out a chair and sat down at the kitchen table. Outside, the rain splashed and gurgled, overflowing the gutter. Surely such heavy rains in February were something new? I must remember to ask him. I poured myself a cup of tea. Ben, since our liminal conversation, had been drinking only water.

  “So isn’t it a bit…cold?”

  He gave me a look of mild reproach. “Yeah. But when you think our Lord was crucified, it sort of puts it in perspective?”

  The rising inflection made him sound defensive. I felt a flutter of panic.

  “Is it something you think about a lot, Ben?”

  He opened his school bag, unzipped an inner pocket, and pulled out a book. With a shock of recognition I saw it was Rip’s old school Bible—black, gilt-edged, with the crest of his public school inside the front cover. He leafed through to a page that was bookmarked with an old bus ticket.

  “When ye therefore shall see the…Abomination of Desolation…” he stumbled on the clunky words, “spoken of by Daniel the prophet, stand in the holy place, then let those who are in Judea flee to the mountains. Let him which is on the housetop not come down to take anything out of his house. Neither let him which is in the field return back to take his clothes.” He read carefully, looking up from time to time to check I was still listening. “And then shall they see the Son of man coming in the clouds of heaven, with power and great glory.”

  He paused to take a bite of toast. I had a sudden image of the skyscape I’d seen from the top of the bus. Those gleaming galloping clouds—they were like chariots of glory. “And he shall send his angels with a great sound of a trumpet, and they shall gather together his elect from the four winds, from the uttermost part of the earth to the uttermost part of heaven.” When I didn’t say anything, he added, “Mark chapter thirteen? Verses fourteen to twen’y eight?”

  “Ben…”

  In the silence between us, a sweet curly-haired child hovered on the edge of extinction. I wanted to hug him in my arms. I wanted him to be my little boy again, to tell him stories about rabbits and badgers, but he was somebody different.

  “I’m not saying it’s all rubbish, Ben. That language—it’s very powerful. But don’t you think it refers to things that happened a long time ago?”

  “The Abomination that bringeth Desolation in’t a long time ago, Mum—it’s in the future—soon. Some nutter’ll drop a nuclear bomb on the Temple Mount at Jerusalem. The holy place. That stuff about fleeing into the hills, not going back for anything, not even picking up your coat. The mushroom cloud. It’s all there.” He reached over for the cocoa powder and gave his toast another dusting, then he licked his finger and circled it round in the surplus cocoa on the edges of his plate.

  “But…” How can you take this stuff seriously? I wanted to say. And yet I realised with a pang of apprehension that Ben was far from alone, and it was my own cosy secular world view that was in retreat before a sweeping global tide of belief.

  “Daniel predicted it first. In the Old Testament? Then Matthew and Mark picked up on it? They din’t even know about nuclear weapons, but the way they describe it…it’s kind of uncannily accurate?” His voice, crackly and insistent, seemed alien.

  “But isn’t it just symbolic? You’re not meant to take it literally, Ben.”

  His eyes brightened with zeal. He licked his fingers again.

  “Yeah, that’s what it is. Symbolic. You’ve got to interpret the signs? They’re happening all over the world, the signs of the End Times? If you know what to look out for?”

  Without his crown of brown curls, the dark downy hair on his lip and chin seemed to stand out more against the pallor of his skin. He looked like a stranger—a stranger trying to impersonate someone I knew intimately.

  “But they’re nut-cases, Ben, the people who run those websites.”

  I shouldn’t have let my exasperation show. His voice became whiney and defensive.

  “Yeah, a’right, some may be a bit nutty. But the big guys that run the world—they all know it’s going to happen? George Bush ‘n’ Tony Blair? Why d’you think they’re always praying together? Why d’you think they’re so, like, totally obsessed with the Middle East? Why are they getting so stressed about Iran going nuclear? They know it’s the prophecy of the Second Coming that’s working out in our time? Like, we’re the last generation?”

  He slapped two bits of toast together into a sandwich, and licked at the peanut butter that squeezed out around the crusts.

  “Want to know w
hy America supports Israel? Because in the Bible it says when the chosen people go back to their promised land, like they did in 1948, that’s the start of the End Times.” He bit into the sandwich with a crunch. “It’s sad cases like you and Dad that’ll get left behind.”

  “Left behind what?”

  “The rapture? The Second Coming? When the elect get taken up to heaven, and all the sad gits with their Guardians and their anti-war placards’ll be left behind to stew in the tribulations.” A spot of jam had oozed on to the edge of his plate. He licked it off. “George Bush’s pal Tim LaHaye wrote a book called Left Behind. It’s all in there.”

  “Just because George Bush believes it doesn’t make it true.”

  “Yeah, but maybe they know something you don’t? Like, they’ve got their sources of information? The website’s got five million subscribers?” He gave me a look that was both angry and pitying. “Don’t be so blind, Mum.”

  Then he took a swig of water, got up abruptly taking his bag and his Bible, and stomped off to his room, his pale skull bobbing up and down as he climbed the stairs.

  My stomach clenched into a knot. I finished drinking my tea and went upstairs to my bedroom. I sat on my bed with a pillow behind my back and opened up my laptop. In the rain-washed light from the window, the blue sky of my desktop image seemed absurdly optimistic. I typed End of Time into Google, just as Ben said he’d done. There were literally millions of entries. I started opening a few at random, following links, and all of a sudden I’d found I’d stepped over a threshold into an eerie parallel world I’d never even guessed existed. Ben was right—there were millions of people out there scouring their Bibles and actively trying to calculate the timetable for the end of the world from clues in the text.

  At first I felt piqued. Why hadn’t I read about any of this in the Guardian? Or heard about it on Radio Four? Why hadn’t Rip told me? Then I started to feel scared. Some sites had bizarre names like teotwawki (The End of the World As We Know It), escape all these things, rapture ready. Millions of people clearly were getting ready. The Old Testament prophecies of Daniel and Ezekiel, the four Gospels of the New Testament and the Book of Revelations were quoted again and again in rambling blogs by individuals offering their own personal interpretations of the prophecies, and in huge complex sites with links to dozens of organisations. There were even sites that marketed ‘End Times Products’. One link led to a quotation from a speech by George Bush: “We are living in a time set apart.” It was highlighted in red and animated with horrid little flames, sharp like razor teeth. Another linked mysteriously to a page called ‘How to Fix Self-Tanning Mistakes’.