2009 - We Are All Made of Glue

by Marina Lewycka

  I took the book across to the desk.

  “How can I trace this author?” I asked in a low voice.

  The woman smiled vaguely. “You could try the telephone directory. Or the internet. Would you like me to have a look?”

  “No, it’s all right. Thanks for your help.”

  I gathered my things together as quietly as I could and tiptoed out through the door.

  46

  Smoke circles

  I’d already started cooking dinner when Rip came in just before six o’clock. It was something elaborate involving tofu and lemon grass. Stella was out and Ben was stretched out on the sofa with a book. Since his seizure, he’d been avoiding the computer, and only watched television occasionally.

  “D’you want a hand, Mum?” he shouted down to me. His voice sounded deeper, less croaky, than a couple of weeks ago. How quickly he’d changed.

  “It’s okay,” I shouted back.

  I liked to see him with his nose stuck in a book, as I’d been at his age, though when he came down to eat later on, I saw that the book was Revenge of the Busty Biker Chicks.

  “Hi, Ben! Hi, Georgie!” Rip called as he came in, then he went straight up into the mezzanine study. I could hear him pottering around in there, playing music. Half an hour later, I stuck my head round the door.

  “Dinner’s ready.”

  “What’s all this, Georgie?”

  He was standing in the middle of the room holding a B&Q carrier bag in his hand.

  “Where did you find that?” Then I remembered. I’d shoved it in the cupboard when Mark Diabello came round.

  “Are you planning a bit of DIY?” He was looking at me intently, curiously. I could feel myself turning red.

  “No, not DIY. Collage.”

  “Collage?”

  I smiled inwardly at the incredulity in his voice.

  “You know—sticking things. It’s a form of art.”

  Our eyes met. He grinned. I grinned. We stood grinning at each other across a bridge of lies. I would never tell him that I’d seen him in the library. In all our years together, I’d never before glimpsed his vulnerability. I’d always thought he was the strong one in our relationshjp. I reached out my arms and took a tentative step forward. There was a faint crackle and a smell of scorching, and Ben called from the kitchen: “Come on, you two! The rice’s burning!”

  §

  Dad always used to say, “I like a bit of burned,” which was just as well, because Mum often obliged. Sometimes she went too far, like the first Sunday lunch Rip had with us at Kippax, when she placed a charred and blackened chicken in front of Dad for him to carve.

  “Poor little bugger looks like ‘e’s been cremated,” said Dad.

  “Nowt wrong wi’ cremation,” said Mum. “Keeps you regular.”

  I hadn’t told Mum yet that Rip had moved back in—1 didn’t want to tempt fate—but I rang her after dinner to find out how Dad’s operation had gone. She was in an ebullient mood.

  “They did a biopic. Doctor says it in’t cancer.”

  “Oh, that’s good. How’s he feeling?”

  “Full of chips. Food were lovely in ‘ospital. Got into a blazing argument with the bloke in the next bed about Iraq. Keir’s coming home, by the way. Did I tell you?”

  “No, you didn’t. That’s good news, too.”

  It would be good to see Keir again. Since he’d joined the army, our worlds had drifted apart; nowadays all we had in common was our shared childhood, but Mum resolutely held us together like the family glue.

  “She sent us some lovely flowers, by the way, your Mrs Sinclair. And a card. Best wishes for your recovery.”

  “I didn’t know she knew about Dad.”

  “Oh, we keep in touch. She rings up from time to time. Or I ring her.”

  “Really?”

  This was complete news to me. I tried to imagine what Mum and Mrs Sinclair would talk about. Then I realised they probably talked about us.

  I poured another glass of wine and put my feet up on the sofa while Rip and Ben put the rice pan to soak and cleared up in the kitchen. Then the phone rang.

  “Georgine, come quick! We heff an invitation!”

  Mrs Shapiro’s breathy voice shrilled down the telephone, but I was going nowhere.

  “What’ve we been invited to?”

  “Wait! Let me see—aha, here it is! We are invited to a funeral!”

  My heart lurched. The last thing I needed was bad news.

  “Oh, dear. Who is it?”

  “Wait! It is here! What is this? I cannot read this name. Looks like Mrs Lily and Brown, ninety-one year old, passes peacefully in the sleep at the Nightmare House.”

  So she never did break free, poor thing.

  “Who is this Brown Lily?”

  “She’s the old lady you made friends with in the hospital. And at Northmere House. You know—who was always asking for cigarettes?”

  “This one who got the dead woman slippers? She is not my friend—she is a honker.”

  “But it’s nice that you’ve been invited to her funeral. Her family must have remembered you.”

  “What is so nice about a funeral?”

  “Don’t you want to go?”

  “Certainly we must go!”

  The crematorium was in Golders Green, miles away beyond Hampstead Heath. I mentioned this to Nathan, and suggested he might like to come along with his Tati.

  “He’ll enjoy it,” I said. “There’s sure to be plenty of singing.”

  Somehow, the four of us fitted into Nathan’s Morgan, even though it was really a glorified two-seater. Nathan and Mrs Shapiro sat in front. She was wearing a long black coat that smelled pleasantly of mothballs and Chanel N°5—better than the stinky astrakhan—and a chic little black beret with a veil and a feather. Nathan’s Tati squeezed into the back with me. He was wearing a raincoat and a Bogart-style trilby. I was wearing my smart grey jacket and a black scarf. The car struggled under the weight of us all as we crawled up the Finchley Road. It was a Saturday morning in April, the air warm and sparkling in the slanting sunlight. In the residential streets the front gardens were already frothy with cherry blossom.

  Nathan’s Tati took Mrs Shapiro’s hand to guide her up the step to the crematorium, and she acknowledged the gesture with a gracious nod. There were only two other people in the chapel when we arrived, a grey wispy-looking woman who introduced herself as Mrs Brown’s niece, Lucille Watkins, and her father, Mrs Brown’s brother. He was tall and lean, with rosy cheeks and a twinkle in his eye—one of those wiry sprightly ninety-somethings who go on for ever.

  “Charlie Watkins,” he introduced himself, lingering over Mrs Shapiro’s chipped-varnish fingers which she extended graciously to him. “I think we met at the ‘ospital once. Did you know our Lily well?”

  Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Nathan’s Tati watch him, bristling with annoyance.

  “Not well,” Mrs Shapiro replied, fluttering her eyelids. “Only from smoking. And from slippers. She got the dead-woman slippers.”

  “Smokin’ like a kipper!” he chuckled, nodding towards the flower-covered coffin in front of us. “That sounds like our Lily.”

  I wasn’t particularly surprised when Ms Baddiel turned up, too, just as the service was about to start.

  “It’s always so-o sad when a client passes away,” she murmured, searching in her oversize bag for a packet of tissues.

  There was music playing in the chapel, spooky-sounding organ music that made you feel as though you were already halfway into the next world. The coffin with its single wreath of lilies rested on an ornate catafalque to the left of the altar. A plaque on the wall solemnly reminded us Mors janua vitae. Death is the gateway to life. Where had I heard that before? Tall leaded ‘windows filtered and chilled the sunshine leaking in from outside, turning it into a cool greenish fluid. It reminded me of the bivalves, clinging on under the sea. We spread out around the pews, trying to make ourselves look like more than seven. Mrs Sha
piro sat in the front row, and Nathan’s Tati took up his position beside her. Nathan and Ms Baddiel sat in front on the other side. The niece and her father spread out in the middle, and I sat at the back. How sad, I was thinking, to have just seven people at your funeral, two of whom had never even met you. A thin man in a black suit droned through a short liturgy and disappeared. We all looked around, wondering whether this was all. Then suddenly there was a rustling behind us; the organ music stopped mid-note and gave way to a jolly lilting big-band number. Ba-doop-a-doop-a! Ba-doop-a-doop-a!

  You could hear everybody gasp. Charlie Watkins rose to his feet and did a little hip-swing in the pew, then he squeezed out past his daughter and bopped up to the lectern. As the music faded away, he cleared his throat and began.

  “Ladies and gen’lemen, we’re ‘ere to celebrate the life of a great lady, and a great dancer, Lily Brown, my sister, who was born Lillian Ellen Watkins in 1916 in Bow. She was the youngest of three sisters and two brothers (he was reading from a sheet of paper he’d fished out of his jacket pocket, modulating his voice like an actor). Now I’m the only one what’s left, and all that past life, the ‘appiness and sorrow, the triumphs and disappoin’ments, is all washed away on the tides of time.” He fumbled in his pocket for a handkerchief. There was a general shuffling in the pews. This wasn’t at all what we’d expected. He blew his nose and continued. “Even when she was a young gel, our Lily danced like an angel.”

  The Watkinses were a Music Hall family. Charlie described how Lily enrolled for dance classes at the City Lit, got pregnant, ran off to Southend, then came back to London a year later, without the baby and without the boyfriend. Her breakthrough came when she got a place in the chorus line at Daly’s. He paused, snuffling into his hankie—it wasn’t for effect, the emotion was genuine—then he leaned forward, departing from his script.

  “I seen ‘er up there on the stage, kickin’ like she could kick the bollocks off a giraffe.”

  In the front pew, I could see Ms Baddiel quiver like a soft jelly, dabbing at her eyes with a tissue while Nathan slipped a solicitous arm around her shoulder. There was something about that gesture that sent a pang of longing through me—not longing for Nathan—that was in the past—but for the warmth of human comfort.

  Lily settled in Golders Green, married and lost a soldier.

  “That’s when she took to smokin’,” said Charlie, “puffin’ away like she wanted to be up in ‘eaven.”

  He blew his nose again and raised his eyes. “Ladies and gen’lemen, I ask you to pray for the soul of Lillian Brown. May she dance with the angels.”

  The band music started up again, Ba-doop-a-doop-a! Ba-doop-a-doop-a! Then with a clatter of rollers, the coffin disappeared through the wooden doors. I thought of the old woman I’d known as the bonker lady, trying to keep her image in my mind’s eye as the coffin rattled away, and despite the cheerful music, tears welled up in my eyes. What cruel tricks time plays on us! Before the cigarettes and the crusty toenails, before the deep-grooved wrinkles and the crumpled mind, there’d been another Mrs Brown—a young woman who danced in one of the most beautiful chorus lines in London, who lived life to the full, who could kick the bollocks off a giraffe.

  Ba-doop-a-doop-a! Ba-doop-a-doop-a! Ms Baddiel and Nathan and Nathan’s Tati were swaying in time to the music and fluttering the tissues which Ms Baddiel had handed out. The niece and Charlie Watkins were sobbing and bopping, and I found my feet, too, were pulled by the irresistible rhythm. Only Mrs Shapiro was standing stock-still—her back was to me, so I couldn’t see the look on her face. Suddenly a current of air caught the folding door behind which the coffin had disappeared, making it swing forward, and, I swear I’m not making this up, as it gusted towards us a puff of grey smoke eddied out into the chapel, circling and wreathing around us before it drifted away.

  The sunlight stung our eyes as we shuffled outside into the Garden of Rest and walked in a sad tight knot between the flower beds. Mrs Shapiro lit a cigarette and sat on a bench puffing away, as if in honour of her fractious former smoking companion. I wandered along looking at the names on the memorial plaques on the walls—there were so many. Some names I recognised—Enid Blyton, Peter Sellers, Anna Pavlova, Bernard Bresslaw (Mum’s favourite actor), H.G. Wells (one of Dad’s gurus), Marc Bolan (died so young!) and alongside them all the hundreds of anonymous dead, jostling together for a bit of memory space. Soon enough we’ll all be anonymous except to the few people who knew us, I was thinking, until they in their turn become anonymous, too.

  That’s the thing about funerals—even if you hardly know the person who died, the closeness of death itself makes you melancholy. I recalled the people whose mysterious lives had brushed against mine—beautiful Lily Brown, before she became the honker lady; Mustafa al-Ali the chosen one and his anonymous twin who died on the hillside; Artem Shapiro who had trekked across the Arctic; Naomi Shapiro of the blazing eyes; and the old lady I thought of as Naomi Shapiro, but who was really someone else. Were they exceptional people, or was it the time they lived through that made them seem exceptional? Had our safe post-war world stripped all the glamour and heroism out of life (sob) leaving us with the husks (sob)—consumer goods wrapped up in stylish packaging (sob, sob)? By now the tissue Ms Baddiel had given me was completely soggy. Blinded with tears, I stumbled on a step, stubbed my toe on a stone plinth and almost fell into the pond.

  Charlie Watkins was clutching his daughter’s arm, his tall thin frame shaking with each breath. I wanted to ask him what had happened to the baby—had she aborted it or given it up for adoption? I wanted to know about Mr Brown—was he the one who ran away to Southend, or the one who brought her here to Golders Green? Had he loved her? Did he stay with her to the end? But he’d crumpled the bit of paper back into his pocket, and his eyes were full of tears. He pointed up at the chimney, where a faint wisp of smoke curled into a perfect circle, wavered in the wind, and was gone.

  “There she flies! Our angel!”

  Wheeee! A high-pitched whining sound carried on the air, like the distant whirr of angel wings. We all stopped and looked around. It was an eerie sound, as if her spirit was amongst us, trying to speak from another world.

  His daughter leaned over and whispered in his ear, “Dad, you’re whistling!”

  “Sorry. Sorry.”

  He reached up and adjusted his hearing aid.

  That gesture broke the tension. Everybody laughed, brushed their tears away, and started to move purposefully towards the car park. It’s all very well thinking about the passing of time and the presence of death, but there’s work to be done, dinners to be cooked, life to be lived. I put the soggy tissue away, and that’s when my fingers touched something hard and long at the bottom of the jacket pocket. It was a key. I fished it out. Where had that come from? When was the last time I’d worn this jacket? Then I remembered. It was when I first met Mrs Goodney over at Canaan House.

  It wasn’t until we got to the car park that we realised Mrs Shapiro was missing. With a mutter of irritation, we split up to scour the gardens. Everybody was ready for home by now. A cool wind had sprung up, and all the emotion had made us hungry and tired. It was Nathan’s Tati who found her. She’d strayed right out of the crematorium and across Hoop Lane into the Jewish cemetery. He’d come across her wandering among the graves and led her back solicitously, supporting her on his arm.

  “She keeps going on about some artist,” he whispered to me. “Poor old thing.”

  47

  The penthouse party

  It was Mrs Shapiro’s idea to hold a house-warming party for the penthouse suite. We drew up the guest list together one morning over a cup of coffee in the kitchen. The sun had come out, and a mild blossom-scented breeze wafted in through the open back door. Mrs Shapiro was in an effervescent mood. Her hair was pinned up and she was wearing a crumpled not-very-white cotton blouse with her smart brown slacks and the Lion King slippers. She saw me looking at them, and gave a little shrug.

&nbs
p; “They are quite ugly, isn’t it? But Wonder Boy adores them.”

  “Mm,” I said.

  “We can invite the charming old man from the crematorium. He is good at singing. Pity he is so old. And his petit son.”

  “Good idea. Who else?”

  It seemed incredible that Mr Ali and the Uselesses had managed to install a functioning shower and toilet and three Velux windows in the attic rooms, without further mishap—but it was true. They’d moved their stuff up there, and all the junk—what was left of it—was piled up in a side room whose ceiling was too low to make a useful living space.

  “It will be a musical soiree. Or maybe it will be a garden party. What you think?”

  “I think we should be flexible. You can never tell what the weather’s going to do.”

  “You are very wise, Georgine,” she nodded, as though I’d offered some great insight into the human condition.

  Upstairs we could hear thudding and hammering as Chaim and the Uselesses put the finishing touches to the floorboards. They’d hired a sander for the day without realising the amount of preparation that was needed. Mr Ali had gone off on some mysterious errand to B&Q. I noted how tidy everything was in the kitchen, a stack of washing-up still covered in soapsuds draining at the side of the sink.

  “Maybe when they’ve finished the penthouse suite we can discuss some kitchen improvements with Chaim and Mr Ali.”