Chapter 5: The Friendship Glue

Pip Stitch arrived on a Thursday afternoon with a rucksack over one shoulder and the expression of someone who had travelled a very long distance to deliver a piece of her mind in person.

She was small for eleven, with dark plaits that never quite stayed put and a way of looking at you that suggested she was adding up your faults and would present you with an itemised bill later. Marguerite had not seen her in six months. They had been best friends since they were seven, and then they had been nothing at all, which was somehow worse than never having been friends in the first place.

"Your dad told my mum where you'd gone," Pip said, standing in the doorway of the shop. She did not say hello first. That was very like Pip.

Marguerite, who had been attempting to understand why a teapot on the third shelf insisted it could only pour backwards, set the pot down rather more carefully than necessary. Something was tightening in her throat, and she did not trust it.

"Right," she said, which was not what she meant to say but was all that came out.

Pip looked past her at the shelves of broken things, at Mr. Cog behind his counter writing in the ledger with his fountain pen, at the dust motes turning slowly in the amber light from the window. Her eyebrows climbed towards her hairline, which was also very like Pip. She had always had extremely expressive eyebrows.

"This is mad," she said. "Your gran ran a shop for broken promises?"

"Impossible repairs," Marguerite corrected. "Not promises. Well. Sometimes promises. And other things."

"That's the maddest thing I've ever heard."

"You haven't heard very many mad things, then," Marguerite said, which came out sharper than she'd intended.

They looked at each other for a long moment. Six months stretched between them like a very small ocean.

Pip shifted her rucksack to her other shoulder. "Mum says I have to stay for tea because it's rude to travel all this way and leave straightaway. Even if we're not speaking."

"We are speaking," Marguerite said. "We're speaking now."

"You know what I mean."

Marguerite did know. There was a difference between speaking and Speaking, the way there was a difference between being in the same room and actually being with someone. They had been not-Speaking for exactly six months and four days, which was long enough that Marguerite could no longer remember precisely what they'd fought about. Something to do with a school project. Or possibly a birthday party. Or perhaps the fact that Pip had said something and Marguerite had said something back, and somehow the saying had opened up a crack between them that neither of them knew how to close.

Mr. Cog cleared his throat with the delicate precision of a man who has witnessed many awkward reunions and does not intend to involve himself in this one.

"I shall make tea," he said, and disappeared through the door at the back of the shop before either of them could tell him not to bother.

Marguerite and Pip stood in the amber-lit silence of the Department of Impossible Repairs, and the broken objects on their shelves seemed to lean in slightly, interested.

"So," Pip said. "Do you like it here?"

"I don't know yet," Marguerite said truthfully. She found she was becoming unsure about many things lately. Whether she was brave. Whether she was good at maths. Whether her favourite colour had always been blue or if it was actually green. Small certainties were slipping away from her like water through a colander, and she had not yet told anyone because telling would require admitting there was something wrong, which would require certainty about what counted as wrong.

"It's creepy," Pip said, but she was examining the objects in the window now with the focused attention she usually reserved for particularly complicated maths problems. "That glove's been looking for its pair since 1953?"

"That's what the tag says."

"What if the other glove doesn't want to be found?"

Marguerite blinked. She had not considered this. "I suppose that would be sad for the first glove."

"Or a relief," Pip said. "Maybe it's knackering, all that looking. Maybe it would rather just be a single glove and get on with its life."

They were not, Marguerite realised, talking about gloves.

Pip turned from the window. Her face was doing something complicated, the way faces do when they are trying very hard not to cry and also trying very hard not to let you see that they are trying very hard not to cry.

"I didn't come here to fight," she said. "I came because Mum made me. But also because I wanted to. Which is confusing."

"I wanted you to come," Marguerite said. "But also I didn't want you to come. Which is also confusing."

"We're both confused, then."

"Very confused."

"Good," Pip said. "That's something."

It was not much of a something, but it was more than they'd had six months ago. Marguerite felt the tightness in her throat again, and this time she recognised it for what it was: hope. Hope that they could repair what had broken. Hope that the crack between them could be filled in. Hope that was also terrifying, because hope could be disappointed, and disappointment was worse than nothing.

She thought of the Promise-Mending Needle and Mrs. Firth's son, who had come to dinner but hadn't actually changed. She thought of the Apology Amplifier and the woman who could not stop forgiving, even when forgiveness was the wrong thing to give. She thought of Tom Dredge, who had borrowed courage from next Tuesday and paid for it when he needed it most.

And then she thought: but this is different. This is Pip. We were best friends. We could be best friends again.

The idea arrived fully formed, the way bad ideas usually do.

"Wait here," she said.

She went to the back room where the gadgets lived on their shelves, each one labelled in her grandmother's small, precise handwriting. She found it on the fourth shelf, between the Memory Tape and the Trust Compass: a small glass pot with a stopper, filled with something that looked like mother-of-pearl and moonlight had been melted down and set to cool.

The label read: Friendship Glue. Rebonds fractured friendships to their strongest historical point. Apply once. Effects permanent.

Marguerite unstopped the pot.

The smell hit her immediately. It smelled like the summer they had met, when they were seven and the world was new. It smelled like the park near Pip's house and the corner shop that sold penny sweets and the classroom where they'd sat side by side every day for three years. It smelled like all the best days they'd ever had, condensed into a single, overwhelming sweetness.

She carried the pot back into the shop.

"What's that?" Pip asked.

"Friendship Glue," Marguerite said. "From my grandmother's collection. It rebonds broken friendships to their strongest point."

Pip stared at the pot. Then at Marguerite. Then back at the pot.

"That's definitely mad," she said, but she didn't sound uncertain. She sounded interested.

"Probably," Marguerite agreed.

"Does it work?"

"Everything here works," Marguerite said, which was true, though she was beginning to understand that working and helping were not always the same thing.

"And you want to use it? On us?"

Marguerite hesitated. She thought of Mrs. Firth's hollow victory and the shopkeeper's dangerous forgiveness and Tom Dredge sitting silent at his father's table. But then she looked at Pip, standing in the amber light with her rucksack and her plaits and her complicated eyebrows, and she thought: this is different. We were genuinely best friends. Putting us back to that point won't create something false. It will just restore what we lost.

"Yes," she said.

Pip bit her lip. "All right. Let's do it."

Marguerite dipped her finger into the glue. It was warm, and it clung to her skin like a living thing. The label hadn't said what to do with it, but somehow she knew. She reached out and touched Pip's hand. Pip reached out and touched hers. Their fingers met in the space between them, and the glue transferred from Marguerite's skin to Pip's, from Pip's back to Marguerite's, until they were both holding it, sharing it, carrying it together.

The effect was immediate.

Something loosened in Marguerite's chest, like a knot being untied by warm, invisible hands. The tightness in her throat disappeared. She looked at Pip and Pip looked at her, and they smiled at exactly the same moment, the way they used to.

"Do you remember," Pip said, "when we made that den out of bed sheets and your dad kept tripping over the doorway?"

"And you laughed so hard you hiccupped for an hour," Marguerite finished.

"And we made a rule that anyone who entered had to say the password, which was 'buttercup,' and your dad kept pretending he'd forgotten—"

"Even though we'd told him fifty thousand times—"

"And we ate Jaffa Cakes until we felt sick—"

They were finishing each other's sentences, the way they had when they were nine. They were laughing at the same jokes. They were looking at each other with the uncomplicated delight of children who have found someone who understands them completely, who thinks they are funny and clever and worth listening to, who is simply and perfectly on their side.

It felt wonderful.

They spent two hours in the shop, talking and laughing and remembering. Mr. Cog brought tea and biscuits and retired tactfully to the back room. Marguerite showed Pip the gadgets — the Promise-Mending Needle, the Apology Amplifier, the Courage Thermometer — and Pip listened with wide eyes and asked the kinds of questions only a very clever nine-year-old would ask, which was odd because Pip wasn't nine. She was eleven.

They both were.

Slowly, as the afternoon wore on, something began to feel wrong.

It started small. Pip made a joke about a teacher they'd had in Year Four, and Marguerite laughed, but even as she laughed she was thinking: I don't actually think that's funny anymore. I thought it was funny when we were nine, but I'm not nine now, and I don't think I'm the same person who laughed at that.

Then Pip said something about how much she hated reading, which had been true when they were nine, but Marguerite knew — from occasional glimpses of Pip's social media before they'd stopped speaking — that Pip had started reading fantasy novels six months ago and apparently loved them. But now, stuck to the friendship's strongest point, Pip was saying she hated reading, because that had been true then.

Marguerite heard herself agreeing. Heard herself saying she didn't like books either. But she did like books. She liked them more now than she had at nine. She liked books and she liked the shop and she liked the quiet, serious person she was becoming, who was different from the loud, silly person she'd been at nine. But the glue held her to who she was then, and who she was then was not who she was now.

They smiled at each other. Neither of them said what they were both feeling.

This isn't right.

This isn't us.

We've changed.

Pip's mother came to collect her just after six. Pip hugged Marguerite goodbye with the fierce, uncomplicated affection of a nine-year-old, and Marguerite hugged her back, and when Pip left, Marguerite sat down on the floor behind the counter and felt, for the first time, genuinely frightened.

The friendship was repaired. It was also wrong.

She had glued them to who they were, but they weren't those people anymore. The glue held them frozen at their peak, and growing past that peak was now impossible. They were nine-year-old best friends trapped in eleven-year-old bodies, and it felt exactly like wearing shoes three sizes too small.

"It worked," she said aloud to Mr. Cog, who had reappeared and was tidying teacups with his usual precision. "The gadget worked."

"Yes," he said.

"But it feels wrong."

"Also yes."

"Will it wear off?"

Mr. Cog set down the teacup he was holding. He looked at her with something that might have been pity or might have been recognition.

"The label said permanent," he said gently.

Marguerite put her head in her hands.

That was when Pip reappeared in the doorway, slightly out of breath. "Mum's gone back to get the car," she said. "She forgot where she parked. I've got five minutes."

She crossed the shop and picked up the ledger that sat on the counter. Marguerite tried to tell her not to, but Pip was already flipping it open, running her finger down the pages of her grandmother's small, cramped handwriting.

"What is this?" Pip asked. "Repairs? Costs?" She stopped. Her finger had found an entry near the beginning of the book. "Marguerite Tinker, age 0," she read aloud. Her voice went quieter. "Repair requested: future. Cost: all remaining certainty. Performed by: E.C."

The shop went very still.

"What does that mean?" Pip whispered.

Marguerite didn't answer. Couldn't answer. The words were ringing in her head like the shop's brass bell, except the bell asked a question and these words were an answer to a question she hadn't known how to ask.

She reached for the ledger. Pip let her take it. Marguerite stared at the entry. Her own name. Age zero. The day she was born.

Mr. Cog appeared at her elbow — she hadn't heard him move — and gently, firmly, closed the ledger.

"That," he said, "is a conversation for another day."

But it was too late. Marguerite had read it. Pip had read it. The words existed now, spoken aloud, witnessed, real.

Repair requested: future.

Cost: all remaining certainty.

Performed by: E.C.

Eudora Crawe.

Her grandmother.

Had repaired Marguerite's future.

And paid for it with all her remaining certainty.

Pip's mother honked from the street. Pip looked at Marguerite, and for a moment — just a moment — the glue loosened, and she was not a nine-year-old offering uncomplicated affection but an eleven-year-old with eyes full of something complicated and frightened and real.

"I'll come back," she said.

Then she was gone.

Marguerite stood alone in the shop full of broken things, holding the closed ledger, while outside the light faded and Puddling Lane grew dark and the city carried on around her, indifferent and enormous and full of people who had never had their futures repaired at a cost they did not know they'd paid.

"Mr. Cog," she said quietly.

"Yes, Miss Tinker."

"What did my grandmother do to me?"

Mr. Cog was silent for a long moment. Then he said, in a voice that carried the weight of twelve years of waiting:

"She saved your life."