Shelf-help, an amateur's guide

Ethel Pilkington was a disaster. No, that’s not fair. The potential for disaster clung to Ethel like cheap body spray. She was clumsy, forgetful and impractical. Six foot tall and lean as a Conservative public spending budget, she contained neither a superfluous ounce nor a milligram of common sense. Exceptionally well-read, she could tell you the difference between a trilobite and an isopod, explain the origins of Lebanese kofta (and of that country’s fiscal stew) and unpack the main tenets of Socratic thought. Yet she could take a full four minutes to work out a trestle table.

When in motion, Ethel appeared to have too many limbs - the spare ones invariably thwacking you in the face as she talked, or sending small children teetering onto grass verges as she propelled herself towards a departing bus. Luckily - if you were carrying eggs or simply not in the mood for physical abuse - you got advance notice of her approach; she could be spotted from the International Space Station in her garish blue, yellow, and red home-knitted cardigan that looked like an epileptic fit in mohair. This multi-coloured warning system gave you just enough time to pretend to tie your shoelace, duck into the nearest shop, or get yourself to safety on the other side of the street. People had been known to hail passing cabs to avoid her, even though they had nowhere to go.

Ethel was, however, like all of us, a delicately woven creature. Full of complexity, nuance and contradiction. Often insensitive to the chaos she left in her wake and to the fact she talked too long and too loud, if you came to her with a problem she could earn an Olympic gold medal for long-distance listening.

She was infinitely kind and thoughtful. If you sat next to her on a flight to Istanbul, she would insist you take her window seat before landing so you might catch a glimpse of the Blue Mosque, crouched like a great sand-covered crustacean (“Don’t look for a big blue eyeball, oh no. It’s actually more of a cream colour – it gets its name from the tiles that line the dome, on the inside”). You would accept the offer, seeing it as fair compensation for having spent the past half hour under a hail of factoids, Ethel mistaking the panic in your eyes for genuine fascination. You’d have learned that Istanbul possesses in excess of 1 million stray cats, that the Turkish language differs from English in its reliance on suffixes to change a word’s meaning, and that British explorer Freya Stark ventured into remotest eastern Turkey on horseback in the 1950s, making friends with Kurdish tribespeople and dominating the language while her peers back home were sewing covers for ottomans and mastering the perfect cheese board.

In reality, though, you would be spared all of this, as Ethel would never have boarded the flight in the first place. She would have left her passport at home, inexplicably in the freezer next to the minted peas. She had never yet made it to Europe, never mind Istanbul, for this and similar reasons.

In seventh grade her history teacher – all elbow patches and self-congratulatory wit – would call her ‘Ethel the Unready’, as (like clockwork) she always arrived 10 minutes late and had usually forgotten her homework. She was ripe for bullying, yet never was. No one had to steal her lunch as she shared it willingly. No one had to trip her up, as she could do that all by herself. Plus she was exceptionally beautiful, and her beauty had a kind of sedating effect on the ferals. Of course she was exasperating, too, and this trait tended to dominate in later years.

So while she’d had many a boyfriend – all lured towards her towering loveliness as desperate men to a lighthouse or to the glow of a pub's lamps on a rainy night – they proved to be built of flimsy material. They found her eccentricities and penchant for mishap simply outweighed the benefits of being in the company of such a creature. It was as if they had purchased a sublime Italian sofa, only to discover it had a wonky leg. They felt cheated.

Ethel, now in her late 30s, lived alone. She realised love was just not meant to be, and while not exactly okay with it, she bore it stoically. She worked in a second-hand bookstore – which you’d have thought was the last place she ought to spend her time. It was a cramped space; to browse the Victorian literature section you almost had to breathe in, as if in solidarity with the corseted heroines; and the extra tomes were piled in precarious skyscrapers. Yet not once did Ethel cause a disaster there. It was as if her deep, deep love of books equipped her with invisible whiskers to aid spatial awareness.

Her colleagues loved her, not just for her home baking - yes, she navigated tins and hot ovens! Another miracle of survival - but for her literary passions and ability to locate just about any title in the fabulously disorganised store. But whoever was rostered on with her learned to hover close by when customers entered, to intercede as needed. Ethel was prone to holding people hostage for 20 minutes at a time with her thoughts on anything from the reluctant hero trope to the sexuality of Piglet, and had been known to insist on reading passages aloud to a customer wavering over a purchase. Some were delighted, some scurried away citing fake appointments, others bought an entirely unsuitable book just to escape. Several asked for her phone number.

So when Ethel attended a book launch and bumped into her neighbour Mildred – not literally, thank god, as Mildred had two bad knees and was due for a hip operation – she immediately offered help on hearing of the 77-year-old’s storage dilemma. Mildred lamented to Ethel, over a nicely chilled glass of Oyster Bay, that her son Colin was moving house and had decided Mildred’s apartment was as good a place as any to dump his excess possessions. Of late, the boy barely registered his mother’s existence except when he needed something. “You like books,” Colin had wheezed as he pushed through the door to Mildred’s home with several boxes of tomes – shouty self-help manuals, and pudgy volumes on investment and crypto currency. Mildred was a devotee of Austen and Atwood.

The floor of Mildred’s small dwelling was now home to what looked like a 3D model of Manhattan, high-rise boxes and tower blocks of books everywhere – her grey carpet a murky Hudson River. She moved gingerly around it, like a cautious King Kong. Although the books – from what she could see – were not to her taste, books were books. Most people would have considered selling them or dumping them in a skip, but Colin might one day come back for them. These ugly volumes gave her some sort of thread back to him, though over recent times that thread had become worn and frayed.

Mildred needed to put up shelving, as one of these days she’d trip over the lot and end up slap bang in the middle of Central Park (as she had christened the small empty patch at the centre of the piles). She could ask Colin, but didn’t want to ‘put him out”.

Ethel was horrified at her friend’s potential Fall (Mildred was of an age where “She’s had a fall” meant “The funeral is next Monday”). She immediately offered to help. She would buy planks of wood, borrow a drill and the matter would be sorted.

*****

Getting a drill wasn’t easy. Ethel asking to borrow a drill was like Hannibal Lecter requesting the loan of your best boning knife; you didn’t want any part of it. In the end she bought her own, plus a set of sturdy screws. She felt that a drill was as essential to a single woman as a financial buffer and an electric blanket, and wondered how on earth she had managed without one until now.

After a modest early dinner of sausages and peas (“ah, there’s my passport!"), Ethel gathered up the planks, felling two lamps and a coatstand, and climbed the stairs with purpose and resolve. Mildred set about making tea in her shoebox of a kitchen as Ethel measured, marked and drilled. Not possessing any common sense of her own, she borrowed some from YouTube. The shelves were long, extremely heavy and unwieldy, but Ethel was strong and managed to guide them over the supports now affixed to the wall without either rendering Mildred unconscious or smashing anything of value.

When finished, the shelves were by no means perfect. Looking at them you could fancy yourself on an ocean liner, listing in a storm. But they got most of central Manhattan off the carpet and onto the walls and for that Mildred was enormously grateful. “I’ll cook you dinner one day next week, dear. You look like you could do with a good pot roast.” And that was that.

An hour or so later, Ethel’s knitting was interrupted by an almighty crash from above. Sometimes thoughts tiptoe into our minds. Sometimes they burst in just like that – with an ear-splitting cacophony, complete with cymbals. The crashing sound acted like a ‘PLAY’ button in Ethel’s head, and the YouTube DIY video unspooled slowly across her memory, pausing on one critical portion. “Now anchor your wall plugs,” came the cheery DIY-er’s voice “as you’ll need these to secure the screws. Haha, no one wants these guys” – he gestured to the stout planks leaning against the wall in the video background – “crashing down on you in the middle of the night.”

In a flurry of knitting needles and wool, Ethel sprang off the sofa, grabbed her bunch of keys and legged it upstairs four steps at a time. She hammered on Mildred’s door. “Mildred!!!!!! Are you okaaaay?” Silence. “Mildred, it’s me!!” Again, silence. Silence that was as deafening as the crash.

Ethel fumbled at her keyring in the hope of finding Mildred’s spare key. Yes, there it was. Forgetfulness was in this case a blessing. She’d failed to return it after watering Mildred’s ferns while she was away visiting her sister – “the sane one”.

Letting herself in, she walked straight into the living room and peered through the darkness, before remembering electricity had been invented and reaching for the light switch. What lay before her was chaos – past, present and future. Three heavy wooden planks lay across the sofa, a fourth had crashed onto the glass table, which had cracked down the centre, and a fifth was tentatively still attached to the wall. It was only a matter of time.

On the table had been a scented candle, and its tiny flame was rapidly gaining promotion as ‘apprentice inferno’, tongues of fire licking and tasting the edge of the curtains. Just as Ethel was trying to remember how to put out flames, the fifth plank ended its procrastination and joined its friends, taking out a chunk of the upright piano on its way down. On the carpet, side tables and ferns lay in disarray. Anything that had escaped a plank had been hit by a toppling tome.

The question “Where is Mildred?” drummed at the back of her head, but she had to deal with the flames first.

Now the adrenaline sent her into overdrive - her mind speed-searching through an invisible card index of ‘what to do in a fire’. She grabbed a throw from the one sofa that was unencumbered by timber and smothered the baby flames before they grew up to make headlines for all the wrong reasons. No one would ever know that, really, it had never been their fault.

Melted ice slid down Ethel’s spine as she spied a fleece-lined slipper peeping out from under the bottom plank. The universe, the supreme master of dad jokes, had slipped a volume entitled ‘The Great Collapse” between timber and shoe. The slipper was the only sign of Mildred, but then she was a diminutive woman. Perhaps she had been napping on the sofa and was in there somewhere. Ethel couldn’t bear to uncover what lay beneath, but it had to be done.

She began to heave planks and books, and though she was frantic she played with the words ‘tome’ and ‘tomb’ in her head and considered the irony, this avid booklover buried by her greatest passion.

At that moment, the door opened behind Ethel, and in walked Mildred, accompanied by a tall and – Ethel could not fail to notice – extremely attractive man.

“Heavens above!!!!! Ethel, dear… what in heaven’s name is going on?!!”

“Mildred!!!!” Ethel flung herself at her old friend, who almost lost her footing but for the grip of – as it turned out – her son Colin, staring at Ethel in bewilderment and awe.

“We… Colin… so unexpected…bite to eat…” Shock had robbed the woman of verbs, and the sentence was muffled anyway by Ethel’s thick black hair as she held Mildred tightly to her.

Ethel released her grip and rained apologies down on her friend, who stood like a small tree that had not yet decided whether to bend, break, or crash to the ground. After a moment, Mildred spoke. “Right then, you two start clearing up, and I will make tea.” This was a good sign. From the kitchen came her high, papery voice, “I’ll need an explanation, but not without Earl Grey.”

“Hi, I’m Colin,” said Colin, caught between staring at Ethel and the apocalyptic scene behind her.

The two began to clear the debris, and Ethel cried quietly as she brushed up soil from the carpet and re-homed the evicted ferns. Between sniffles she explained what had happened, that who knew you needed wall plugs, and Colin shook his head, then raked his hand through his thick locks which nonetheless insisted on escaping between his fingers, glossy and black as licorice strands. He blew out air like a deflated lilo. “No, it’s all my fault. That’s why… should’ve. God, what a dick.”

They continued in silence, and as Ethel began stacking books in a corner she noticed titles like “Suddenly Single” and “Growing through Pain”. A theme ran through her fingers. Somewhere, somehow Colin’s certainties had come tumbling down on him. He was not unfeeling. He was unmoored.

As she gathered up bits of broken plant pot and replaced book covers, she pieced together an imagined backstory for Mildred’s son. The ‘how to succeed’ guides and the ‘don’t give up’ manuals were all pieces of the same puzzle. Here was a man desperate to forge ahead, to gain some secure footing, but always stumbling and finding it harder to get up each time. She filled in the gaps with tropes she had read, which turned out to be true. A beautiful creature who women flocked towards and then abandoned as the depth of his inner turmoil interfered with their own life goals. Abs was one thing, angst was quite another.

Ethel walked over to where Colin was running his hand over the damaged wall, patted his shoulder and said softly “It’s okay.”

The three drank tea together amid charred curtains and sulking ferns. It so happened that Colin was an ace handyman and he was undaunted, indeed energised, by this type of challenge. He said he’d be around at the weekend to fix the holes in the wall. Insurance would cover the piano, the table and curtains – which Mildred professed to loathe anyway. “Stupid trendy white things. Reminded me of a shroud. I’m not dead yet.”

Colin said Ethel should come and give him a hand, because she was the one that made this mess. He was smiling. Ethel said of course, that she would bake double choc chip cookies, and Mildred never took her eyes off her son the whole time. Ethel would find a home for the books, and take back the planks of wood. To build her own shelves, she explained. At this both Colin and Mildred visibly flinched. “I’ll swing by after we’ve sorted this place out. We’ll put them up together,” said Colin.

Ethel absent-mindedly picked up a book from the arm of the sofa. It was a travel guide to Greece, the Greek Islands and Turkey. “This yours?” she said to Mildred, surprised as her friend was a resolute non-traveller. When you live in a city as rich and nourishing as this one, why would you want to go anywhere else, Mildred had always insisted? Books were her preferred way of seeing the world. Cheaper, no jet lag, and with better tea.

“It’s mine,” Colin smiled sadly. “I had a trip planned with my ex, but she dumped me three days before. Should have gone anyway I guess.” An absolute stickler for organisation, he’d already packed and had all their travel documents neatly lined up like the Von Trapp children awaiting the captain’s whistle. The girlfriend had been plotting to exit the relationship for some time, at the end of her tether with Colin’s neuroses. The final blow was the trip, which he had insisted would be good for them. But she had been spooked like a thoroughbred after spying a draft itinerary on Colin’s laptop. It included an alarming number of mosques.

At 10.30pm Mildred departed for bed, and Colin headed for the door. Ethel was right on his heels, so when he abruptly turned, they were eyelash to eyelash. He took a step back, abashed, and said “Hey, thanks for looking after Mum. She’s mentioned you a lot. You are a good sort, despite the fact you trash people’s homes.” He took her hand, and it lingered there a beat longer than gratitude called for.

Ethel entered her apartment to see the moon drizzling liquid silver over her toppled lamps, the fallen coatstand, and the jumble of knitting.

Everything was exactly as it should be.