The Chemistry of Tears by Peter Carey

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 wallinside 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