any longer be(cause) she was a barmaid. But if the priest had any memory he would know he had not behaved exactly as he should. Accidentally she had scratched his face.
The mistress … let her sleep in the kitchen of the inn. The other barmaid was a divorced woman who had run away because her husband …
The other barmaid suggested to Frau Helga that they should live together at Sumper’s Mill which was abandoned.
The mill … wind blew all manner of machinery clanked … groaned … the other barmaid returned to her husband … alone … someone dragging furniture around the floor … Helga’s baby sleeping … an iron poker and go down the stairs … a man … dancing … falling down drunk.
She stayed hidden in shadow … she would have to kill him … throw the body in the river …
Give me the poker, the stranger said to her. Then he took the solid iron poker and bent it across his knee like a celery stick. He bent the iron bar and his face was red and he showed his big teeth in the middle of his beard. Do not be afraid he said.
That was all I, Catherine, could retrieve. I fell asleep at the table, awoken by a knocking on the door. I thought, Matthew. It’s how he came, not often, sometimes. I was terrified, stock-still and sweaty, mouth dust-dry, throat adhering. The blinds and window were open to the garden so anyone could see.
Then he—whoever—was in the area going through my recycling. I heard bottles clinking and was actually, incredibly, ashamed. I crawled on my knees into my bedroom and left the kitchen lights ablaze.
My sick leave was a horror. In the morning I knew I could not use it. I ate dry toast to cushion the painkillers and, having left the shameful jigsaw on the kitchen table, got myself to the tube where the claustrophobia tried to crawl back in. I thought, I cannot do this job. I thought, I have no choice.
At Security my physical destruction provoked bonhomie. I thought nothing but a shot of vodka is going to make me plausible.
I shared the lift with the tiny sporty lesbian from Ceramics—Heather, I think. She was so bright and filled with life. She had bicycled to work and I could see it took everything to stop her running on the spot.
“Bit rough?” she asked me.
I thought, she has such lovely perfect skin. She has no idea she is going to die.
“Did you fly through the volcano?”
If I had seen a newspaper I might have known there had been a vast eruption in Iceland, that the airlines of the world were grounded, but I did not need to read the
My ID card had no idea of my chemical condition. It opened two high-security doors as if I were completely sane and sober. My own studio, of course, was quite unlocked, unlockable.
I thought I will feel like this forever.
It was just on nine o’clock when I donned my rubber gloves and examined the first of the glass rods which it was absolutely not my job to clean.
There must be a procedures meeting before conservation or restoration could begin.
But I could not bear to talk to anyone.
I laid the glass rod on the bench and considered it awhile. These rods, also mentioned on the invoice to Herr Sumper, would simulate water. Then the duck would place its fake anus on a bed of these rotating rods, eating fish and shitting, or counterfeiting life in whatever way the bullying clockmaker had devised. Somewhere there must be a reflective plate to fit beneath the rods and this would help produce the general effect of water.
Perhaps it would be little Heather’s job to deal with the glass rods, but I really did not wish to talk to little Heather. Nor did I wish to dig deeper into the boxes and find God knows, perhaps the embalmed body of Percy Brandling with its jaw broken so it could appear “at peace.”
Heather should be grateful that I would wish to remove all the grease and oil that had seeped into the hollow centres of the rods. They would be a nightmare to clean, but I would happily do it for her. I would use thin brass rods with cotton-wool buds attached. And if the Swinburne procedures could, in all their Victorian wisdom, just cede me this, my pain might stop intensifying.
Before the glass cleaning began I would have to remove the brass collet at the end of each rod. The collet would fit into some as yet unseen mechanism which would rotate the rods. Successive generations of awful pragmatics had visited the site before me, depositing shellac, plaster of Paris, silicon, and each of these inappropriate substances would now require ingenuity, time and patience to remove.
Please let this be mine, I thought.
Please do not be sticklers.
I can do this job in solitude, until I am completely cured, or dead myself.
On this first glass rod someone had used black pitch much as amateurs nowadays use superglue—that is, they had slathered it on the glass then jammed it into the collet and held it while it set. The glass had been damaged by thermal shock. Because of these difficulties, the repaired rods would finally differ slightly from their original length—only a few millimetres’ difference is enough to make reinstalling them a tricky job.
I opened my email account. I read: RE PROCEDURES MEETING.
Delete.
I remained on my swivel chair and looked at the glass rod waiting for ten o’clock when I knew the offy would be open and I could buy a flask of vodka.
I was not worried about the drinking or the stolen notebooks, for both of which I could lose my job. Instead I fretted over a misdemeanour—I had decided to start work without a procedures meeting.
That is, I would make no request to the Head of Section. Instead I’d go to Glenn the Building Supervisor who would innocently give me welding rods and cotton tips.
I found Glenn in his lair and while he was “locating” the welding rods and the cotton tips I went to the offy where I heard that London was the driest capital city in the world. We were to have a desalination plant, it seemed. I expressed amazement. I slipped the bottle in my lovely bag and returned through Security.
By ten past ten I was examining all the dusty glass rods on my workbench. Surely my present dentist had first seen my mouth exactly in this way—the work of fifteen different mediocre technicians over the course of twenty years. I felt the vodka roar down my throat and heat my blood.
I thought, this was how my father felt, each day. This is why they packed me off to boarding school in High Wycombe. When he died we discovered the most ingenious little hiding places for his bottles, carefully crafted little coffins he had constructed when he was allegedly “fixing the wiring” under the floor, or in the ceiling, or the wall inside a storage cupboard. He was such a fastidious, patient man who did not deserve to be changing watch batteries and straps and I would have done anything to have him take my museum job, to use his unwearied enquiring mind to understand a mechanism. I must have tortured him by living the life he would have wanted for himself.
Sometimes he would go to talks at the Guildhall and drag home the lecturer to dinner—what a sad lonely soul he must have been. It would take so long for me to know that I, his daughter, was the Oedipal son.
The white spirits worked rather well on the pitch, and I was gently separating the brass collet from the first rod when Eric Croft entered.
I looked straight into his bloodshot eyes.
“For Christ’s sake, Catherine, please. Go home.”
“Opening my present, like you said.”
Did I slur? He was staring at me rather hard. “If you want to work, there has to be a bloody procedures meeting. What on earth are you trying to do to me?”
“My bronchitis is much better.”
“Catherine, old love, we both know you cannot do this without a meeting.”
There was another knock and the little lesbian opened the door with her elbow and entered, a coffee cup in each hand. Part of me was touched, the rest of me quite horrified.
“Sorry,” she said, but her eyes were on the glass rods and the solvents on my desk. I was in her territory without approval. She spilled her coffee in her rush to get away.
“OK,” I said, and reached to fetch the rod and place it back.
