He went suddenly quiet.

"But...but you learned to be a builder, yes?" I encouraged, wanting to rea.s.sure myself that something positive had come out of all that displacement, all that history clogged up with memories of unrighted wrongs.

"In Ramallah I trained for engineer." (He p.r.o.nounced it inzhineer.) "Here in England I must make new examinations. But I am old and time has tipped his bucket on me. This useless one," he pointed at his nephew, "he will study for engineering, too. Aeronautical."

"Aeronautical?"

That sounded quite brainy. I tried to imagine going up in an aeroplane engineered by Ishmail, and felt an uncomfortable tightening in my chest.

"He has a scholarship." He lowered his voice to a proud whisper. "Other one, I don't know. Now they are both learning English. First-cla.s.s English language course nearby to here-Metropolitan University, next door from a.r.s.enal Stadium."

The Uselesses, realising that they were being talked about, chipped in.

"a.r.s.enal. Yes, please."

Yes, it would need to be a first-cla.s.s English course, I thought.

"So why did you you come to England, Mr Ali? I mean, wasn't your family over there?" come to England, Mr Ali? I mean, wasn't your family over there?"

"You are asking difficult questions, Mrs George."

I could see he didn't really want to talk, but I was still filling in the gaps in the story.

"I'm sorry. It's a Yorkshire habit. Where I come from, everybody knows everybody's business."

He hesitated, then continued. "You know after my youngest son died, I saw no hope. No possibility of end to this conflict. I wanted only to come away from this place. I have a good friend, Englishman, he was a teacher in Friends School in Ramallah. He helped me to come here."

"Your son died...?"

Suddenly, my nosiness had led me into a darker avenue than I'd intended.

"He had a burst appendix." He stared at the ground as though his son's face was pictured there. "We were in Rantis, visiting wife's family. We wanted to take him to hospital in Tel Aviv but we were delayed at the checkpoint. My wife was weeping and pleading with the soldiers-one soldier-he was a boy of eighteen but he had a power of life or death over us. He was playing with his power. He said we must go back to Ramallah. When we got there it was too late." His eyes glinted with a harder brightness. "How can I forgive? My son was fourteen years old."

On a corner of the newspaper, he'd started to draw a map.

"This was five years ago. Now with wall is worse. You can see. Green Line. Wall line." He drew another snaking line. I stared at the map-the crazy curling line-and felt a flutter of panic. Maps. Not my thing. But why did it snake around so much. In fact, why was there a line at all?

"So you wanted to leave...?"

"Now my daughter is married with this Englishman. I have three grandchildren." He smiled briefly. "Drive my wife mad."

I thought I'd like to meet his wife one day.

The Uselesses had finished their cigarettes, and gone off to sit in the van. They must have had a CD player in there, because I could hear strains of Arabic music, sweet and melancholy, drifting incongruously over the damp lawn and dripping brambles.

But maybe all places have their histories of sadness and displacement, I was thinking. People move in, others move on; new lives and new communities spring up among the stones of the old. In school, we'd learned about the history of Kippax, how in the 18405 miners from Scotland and Wales had been recruited as scabs to break up the union in County Durham-desperate hungry men sucking the marrow out of the bones of other desperate hungry men. When the seam at Ledston Luck was opened up, their grandchildren and greatgrandchildren were brought down from County Durham to Yorkshire and settled in Kippax. There are men who shape destiny, who draw lines on maps and shift populations about; and there are men like Dad and Mr Ali who live their lives in the interstices of the grand plans of others, labouring to provide food and shelter for their families.

"So, what you say, Mrs George?" Mr Ali interrupted my thoughts. "They stay here and fixitup the house?"

"I don't know," I said weakly. My heart ached for sad exiled Mr Ali and his charming useless a.s.sistants, but I owed a duty of care to Mrs Shapiro, and the scenario with the ladder had filled me with apprehension. "Maybe if you fix the gutter first, it'll give me time to have a word with Mrs Shapiro."

"Tomorrow," he said, "we come with the new gutter and big ladder. You will see."

"And, er, the window. That needs fixing, too, now."

31.

The epoxy hardener Sometimes when I try to understand what's going on in the world, I find myself thinking about glue. Every adhesive interacts with surfaces and with the environment in its own particular ways; some are cured by light, some by heat, some by the exchange of subatomic particles, some simply by the pa.s.sage of time. The skill in achieving a good bond is to match the appropriate adhesive to the adherends to be bonded.

Acrylics, for example, are known to be fast curing, and they don't require as much surface preparation as epoxies, which have high cohesive strength but a slower cure rate. Epoxy adhesives have two components: the adhesive itself, and a hardening agent, which accelerates the process. On Friday, I was sitting at my laptop, pondering this profound philosophical duality, when a cunning thought slipped into my head. What I needed to re-bond with Mrs Shapiro was a hardening agent. And who could be harder than Mr Wolfe?

Flushed with inspiration, I rummaged in the desk drawer for a card and wrote a get-well-soon note to Mrs Shapiro, adding that I was doing my best to visit her and advising her under no circ.u.mstances to sign anything until we'd talked. I mentioned that I'd found some builders who might be staying at the house while they did some work there-1 freely admit, I didn't go into much detail. I told her the cats were doing extremely well and that Wonder Boy was missing her (well, probably he was, in his own brutal and selfish way). I enclosed a stamped addressed envelope and a blank sheet of paper, put it all in an envelope with the card, and sealed it. Then I walked down to the office of Wolfe & Diabello. A quick reconnoitre in the car park round the back told me that Mark Diabello was out and Nick Wolfe was in.

In the small office, his physical presence was overwhelming; he seemed to fill the whole room, pushing me back against the wall. He greeted me with a bruising hand-grip and asked me what he could do me for. (Either he thought that old cliche was still amusing, or his unconscious was speaking.) I told him in my specially friendly voice that Mrs Shapiro had been asking after him. On a yellow Post-it note, I scribbled the address of Northmere House and, handing him my envelope, said that if he found the time to call round, would he drop off the card from me, too.

"Fine," he said.

Then I went home and got on with Adhesives in the Modern World Adhesives in the Modern World. The article I was editing was about the importance of good joint design in bonding. You see, however good the glue, a poorly designed joint can snooker you. End to end joints should be overlapped if possible, or tongued and grooved, or mortised and tenoned. Or you could go for a hybrid joint-I remembered Nathan's joke, glue and a screw. You should always prepare the surfaces to maximise the bonding area. "Surface atraction is increased, by rouhgening or scraching the surfaces to be bonded."

The article had been written by a young man who knew his glues but seemed to have a total contempt for spelling and punctuation. What do they teach them in school these days, I tutted to myself? Ben was just as bad. I found myself worrying about how he'd got on in school today. He'd struggled to settle into his new cla.s.s when we'd moved down from Leeds; in fact the New Year's email chat with the strange semi-literate Spikey was the nearest I'd got to meeting any of his friends. I was anxious that his shaved head and religious leanings could make him a target for bullies, and while we were having tea that evening I tried to raise it with him.

"What did they say at school, then, when you turned up with you new hair-do-your no-hair-do?"

"Oh, nothing."

Without his brown curls his face looked different. The brown hair was my genetic legacy, but those arched eyebrows, with their slightly haughty lift, and the intense blueness of the eyes-1 could see more of Rip in him now.

"Didn't the kids take the mick?"

He shrugged. "Yeah, a bit, but I don't care. Jesus suffered taunts an' that, din't he?"

Yes, and look what happened to him-I held back the thought, and loaded my voice with maternal concern. "But wasn't it a bit...horrible? I mean, kids can be very cruel."

"Nah," he said. "It's all earthly stuff. Don't bother me. Brings me closer to Our Lord."

When he'd finished his meal, he laid down his knife and fork, put his hands together briefly and closed his eyes. Then he picked up his bag and disappeared upstairs. Maybe I should have been pleased that he wasn't stealing cars or taking drugs, but there was a scary intensity about him that was almost like an aura of martyrdom. I felt a stab of guilt. Was it our failure as parents that had led him to seek out a different kind of certainty? Sometimes I felt I wasn't grown-up enough myself to be a parent-I always seemed to be just a step ahead, making it up as I went along.

Rip didn't have any such uncertainties-he always knew what was right, and committed himself to making it happen. It was one of the things I'd loved about him-his commitment. Yes, perhaps I had been wrong not to take more of an interest in his work. But what exactly was it that he did? Something about global systems for iterating progress. Or iterating systematic progressive globalisation. Or globalising iterative progressive systems. I understood each word on its own, but together, they had the same effect on my brain as phenolic hydroxyls. I'd made some notes once, ages ago, on a bit of paper, while he was explaining it to me, thinking I'd get my head round it in my own time, that one day we would converse about progress, globalisation, systems and suchlike. It was in the desk drawer somewhere, jumbled up with the old rubber bands and the out-of-ink biros.

On impulse, I picked the phone up and dialled his number. A young woman answered-I nearly didn't recognise her voice.

"Stella?"

"Mum?"

The pain of missing her caught me off guard like a thump in the chest.

"Aren't you supposed to be at uni?" (Why was she visiting Rip and not me?) "I...It's reading week. I just came down to see..." I guessed from her hesitation that it might be something to do with her complicated love life. "Do you want to speak to Dad?"

Her voice-so sweet-still reedy like a child's, but with an adult's self-a.s.surance. She'd always been a daddy's girl. Sometimes their closeness made me envious.

"Yes-no. Stella, can we we talk? We always seem to communicate by messages and texts." talk? We always seem to communicate by messages and texts."

"So?" A p.r.i.c.kly tone. She didn't want me making her feel guilty.

"Listen, I'm worried about Ben. Have you noticed anything different about him?"

I realised she wouldn't have seen his haircut yet, but she and Ben were close-they'd fought and loved one another all through their childhoods, just as Keir and I had done.

"He's-always been a bit mental, my little bro."

She was always so confident in her judgements.

"But does he seem unhappy to you?"

"He's cool, Mum. He's got religion in a big way, that's all-like I had Leonardo DiCaprio when I was his age."

"That's what I mean-religion-it doesn't seem quite normal for sixteen."

"I don't know what's wrong with you, Mum. He could be shooting up or nicking cars, and you're stressing about him reading the Bible."

Maybe she's right, maybe that's all it is, I thought, a schoolboy phase. But there was something terrifying about his intensity, the strained look on his face, the dilated eyes.

"He talks about the end of the world as though it's going to happen any minute now."

"Yeah, Dad keeps on at him about it. They had a big row over Christmas. Then Grandpa got stuck in."

"I wondered what that was about."

"Ben started banging on about religion."

"What did he say?"

"Something about miring the sanct.i.ty of Christmas with alcohol and consumerism. They all laughed. Ben got really upset and tried to shut them up."

"Poor Ben." I kept my voice even, but I could feel my rage boiling up in me.

"It was gross. Grandpa called him a pansy."

"What did Ben say?"

"He said, I forgive you, Grandpa." She giggled. I giggled, too. I tried to imagine my father-in-law's face.

"Good for him."

Ben hadn't told me because he'd wanted to spare my feelings.

"Stella, it's lovely to talk to you. Have you finished your teaching practice?"

"Yeah. It was nearly enough to turn me into a ma.s.s child murderer. I don't know if teaching's really me." There was a slight whininess in her voice that I recognised, too. "But anyway, I'll stick with it till the end of the course, then decide. Don't worry about Ben, Mum. He'll be fine."

When I put the phone down I was filled with a wonderful sense of ease, as if a sack of rocks had just rolled from my shoulders; I wanted to run out into the street and hug everybody. Instead, I burst into Ben's room and hugged him.

"You all right, Mum?" he lifted his head from the computer.

"I've just been talking to Stella."

"What did she say?"

"Oh...she said she wasn't sure about teaching-whether it was right for her."

He gave me a long intense look.

"You need to calm down, Mum. You're getting hyper again."

32.

UPVC.

On Sat.u.r.day morning, after Ben had left for Rip's, I got a phone call from Mr Ali.

"You can come and see, Mrs George. House is all fixitup."

They were waiting for me when I arrived-all three of them, plus the cats. The Uselesses were wearing jeans and baseball caps. I don't know what had happened to their Arabic gear. Mr Ali was grinning with pride.

"See?"

Upstairs, where the old Victorian window had been smashed, a brand new double-glazed white UPVC top-opening window unit had been fitted-it was a bit short for the opening, which had been bricked up with breeze blocks to make it fit. There was a new gutter running the length of the house, also in white UPVC. The brambles had been hacked back to make room for a white UPVC table and chair set, and a white UPVC birdbath sat in the centre of the lawn. Wonder Boy was sitting beside it, surrounded by feathers, licking his chops and looking very pleased with himself.

"It's...er...lovely..." I put on a smile.

The useless ones beamed.

"You let them stay, they will fixitup everything for you," said Mr Ali.

"Maybe...maybe not too many repairs. Just essential things. Maybe the woodwork just needs rubbing down and a lick of paint."