Somebody Loves Us All

Praise for
for everyone concerned

‘Wilkins on form, as he often is in this book, is the best around.’
Iain Sharp,
Sunday Star Times

Praise for
The Fainter

‘Outside the pages of Maurice Gee’s fiction, there is no picture of contemporary New Zealand society as convincing as this one, and its creation of individual characters is unsurpassed.’
Nelson Wattie,
Dominion Post

Praise for
Chemistry

‘A terrifically good book, so cleverly constructed and managed. It’s a work of real tenderness … powerful and convincing.’ Jim Crace

‘Wilkins is brilliant at character … the writing is full of verve. Wilkins 
has an eye for telling detail, a great ear for dialogue and a dark sense of humour. It is easy to understand the acclaim he has already won in his  native New Zealand.’
Guardian 

Praise for
Nineteen Widows Under Ash

‘Wilkins reminds me of some of the great American writers—Faulkner, Lowry, Richard Ford—where the simple story you are apparently reading deepens and broadens and throws out layers and shadows, and you are conscious of an underwater life and a sky overhead, but all the time you are immersed in what seems a limpid, even transparent medium.’
Evening Post
 

Praise for
Little Masters

‘
Little Masters
is an engrossing, fiercely readable book. It deals with classic themes of parents and children, love and exile, and the sadness
of separation and dislocation. Damien Wilkins writes brilliantly aboutstreetwise, smart children and adults searching for love and stability far
away from home.’ Colm Tóibín

Praise for
The Miserables

‘Wilkins has constructed a powerful portrait of family life … He handlesthe temporal shifts of the narrative with delicacy, precision, remarkablegrace and apparent lack of effort … the prose is controlled, elegant,  almost deadpan … A moving and subtle piece of work.’
Times Literary Supplement

À Maree, Geraldine et Greta

Praise
Title Page
Dedication
Acknowledgements
Part One
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Part Two
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Part Three
Stephanie arrived at the apartment
She’d booked online
Copyright

This novel was written last year while I lived in Menton, France, as the recipient of the New Zealand Post Mansfield Prize. I would like to acknowledge the trustees and the sponsors of this award which allowed me time and space—an incomparable space—in which to write.

Many people in Menton helped us but I would like to make special mention of William Rubinstein and Luc Lanlo, whose friendship and support were crucial; also M. Loffredo, whose generosity at L’école de la Condamine helped make us feel a little like locals; and the staff at Collège André Maurois for their support; and our friends, John Dyer and Jo Short and their family, whose company (and language) we retreated to whenever in need of the English perspective. Paul Akins provided expert medical advice.

Finally, this novel owes thanks and love to my mother, intrepid cyclist, indomitable pedestrian.

That Saturday Tony Gorzo didn’t call him. ‘Speech Marks’, Paddy’s fortnightly column, had one dedicated fan or at least a reliably responsive reader: Gorzo. He rang Paddy every second Saturday to talk about the newest one. He never missed a column. Usually Gorzo rang in the afternoon, occasionally at night if he’d been out of town or busy during the day. There was a period when the phone would ring and Helena would call out, not bothering to answer it, ‘It’s Gorzo for you.’ She said Paddy had a groupie and it was sweet. She’d never met him. 

Paddy imagined Gorzo had an alarm on his phone or his watch, some method of alert, which told him to ring the man who’d saved his son from life as a retard. It was Tony’s own terminology, and not true. Paddy had helped Jimmy speak again after a serious accident. He was a speech therapist. But Gorzo granted him powers, gifts. And to be honest, it was nice hearing from such a person.

There was no make-up call during the week either. And on Friday evening, Paddy went with his friend Lant to the bike shop and bought a bike.

Maybe Paddy got the bike as a replacement for Gorzo? It seemed unlikely. More momentous surely was the fact that his mother, following a persistent campaign led by Paddy and urged on by his two sisters, had moved into the next-door apartment, having finally sold the family home in Lower Hutt where they’d grown up. After all this time, he was back more or less living with his mother. Was this the opening of the
period in which they’d end up mothering her? It looked a way off. Teresa was fit, active, mentally sharp, a young seventies. Yet one of those great wheels of life had begun a revolution, he thought—wheels, bikes? The last bike he’d owned, he remembered, his mother had given him. It had belonged to his poor father. Anyway, just then Gorzo’s silence loomed larger than Teresa’s presence.

He wheeled the new bike into the apartment and leaned it against the wall by his downstairs office. What was that poem’s lovely ending, the boy staring at his bicycle, ‘consoled by the standing of its beautiful silence’. One of Paddy’s clients—the mother of a boy he was seeing—brought him poetry. Yet looking at his bike, he was not consoled. He thought he’d made a mistake, and he considered taking it straight back to Penny Farthing. He was no cyclist, not in thirty, nearly forty years. And to bike in this city? After each ride, it seemed, you were compelled to write a letter to the editor: To all the jerks behind the wheel, what am I, the invisible rider of the apocalypse? Do I not appear as a Christmas tree in front of you? Cyclists lived lives of great and impotent rage. They were righteous. Worse, they were right. They were the planet’s future. He knew it and he doubted he was one of them.

Helena stood at the top of the stairs. ‘Look at it,’ Paddy said to her. ‘Look at it go.’

He started explaining what the shiny machine was capable of, touching the gear levers, pointing at the disc brakes, trying to remember the sales pitch. In fact there hadn’t been much of one. You were steered to the bike which best suited your needs and abilities. It was Paddy who’d tried to talk the bike shop guy into conceding something pricier might also work in his case. No, Mr Penny Farthing told him flatly, actually looking Paddy up and down—from his toes that slightly turned out, through his thick middle, the girlish bottom (the adjective affectionately supplied had been Helena’s), and up to large and sloping shoulders, appraising the full package—I wouldn’t bother if I were you.

Helena approached. She was about to do her charitable best. She smiled but she was dead tired, almost an exile in exhaustion. It seemed perverse of him to give her a new subject on top of all she was processing with her work. They’d not spoken much through the week. He’d sent her sympathetic looks. She’d apologised for being a drone, a worker bee. Actually, he said, a drone was different from a worker bee. The drone didn’t gather nectar or pollen, or construct the hive, and on evidence she was doing all the above. He’d had a brief apiarist phase as a kid. Drones had bigger eyes than worker bees and didn’t have a sting. They could help adjust the temperature of the hive by shivering or vibrating their wings. He went on a little longer in lecture mode until he saw Helena’s nodding had become virtually a comic miming of rote attention. She was a queen bee anyway, he said. What, she said, clicking alert again, the single female among all those males? I’ll pass. As a queen we feed you and dispose of your waste, he said. And what do I have to do in return? she asked. Basically, he told her, reproduce. At which point she’d emitted a grunt and left him.

In front of the bike, she was wary, blinking. Her first husband, Max, who was German, had done something with sports—Paddy couldn’t recall the details—possibly a swimming instructor? He suspected physical activity in men was a shady area for her, with its whisper of discontent, odd regressive energies. What was Paddy playing at with the bike? What did it mean? In the three years she’d known him—he saw the calculation—he’d never even jogged, though they’d enjoyed walks together. They knew the hills. On Mount Victoria, they’d stood under a tree full of baby tui zipping around, playing a game of tag. The birds swooped among the branches, touching each other’s beaks and then flying off. The craziness was surprising. They’d both thought tui would be solemn, importantly themselves, almost emblematic. Stately singers too. But here they were, thrilled and careless. Almost tuneless.

Finally Helena said of the bicycle, ‘Is it the same one Jeremy’s got?’ She stood off a few feet as if it might start up on its own
accord. Helena didn’t much like his friend, his oldest friend, which was why she always called him by his first name. To everyone else he was Lant. This was a pity, not that puzzling, but it had advantages. From time to time, Paddy had the pleasant, silly sense of being competed over, and an idea too that, with them both as intimates, he was tolerant, wide-ranging. Yet he knew he only had this pair, really. They were everything to him, without being equal of course.

Lant’s involvement in the bike purchase was something he’d hoped to keep from her. Silently he conceded it was a strike against the project.
Two
men plotting physical activity was on a scale of untrustworthiness altogether different. He was influenced by Helena. He’d always been influenced more strongly by women than by men. Absolutely. He thought this was the way of the world and not just how countries such as, well, Italy worked. It was the world’s not very great secret. And it was also one reason why he’d kept Jeremy Lanting as a friend. As a sort of balance, a statement about possibilities on the male side of things. He hoped men weren’t hopeless. Resolutely he didn’t want to join a men’s group.

‘Lant’s is similar,’ he said. He sounded to himself defensive, or defensive disguised as light, and not well. ‘This is the one that best suits me. They tested me on it.’

‘Tested you?’

‘They filmed me on it, riding.’

‘Where’d you go?’

‘Nowhere. It was done with software on their computer. I sat on the bike, turned the pedals, and they filmed me.’

‘How amazing.’

He asked if she wanted to sit on it, touching the sleek seat, which looked something like a sailor’s hat, also rather cruel.

‘No thanks.’

Under her gaze, the bike—an expensive one though certainly not top of the range, that was denied him—so thin and light, began to look flat, lacking a dimension, like a drawing of itself, the effect enhanced when he raised it an inch off the floor with
just two fingers. They were both wishing this insubstantial apparatus away. His cartoon bike.

She went upstairs again while Paddy went into his office, from where he could still see one of the bike’s amazingly narrow wheels.

Above him he heard Helena clicking her tongue in frustration. She’d be at her laptop, the papers spread across the dining table. For the sound to travel was quite something. It was as if she was signalling him—not to come up but simply to understand the reasons why she’d been unable to respond properly downstairs. They’d never liked to leave anything hanging between them, at least until recently. The clicks were speech patently. He went to the door of his office and called up the stairs, ‘All right on the upper deck?’

She called down, ‘Grumble, grumble.’

When they both had work on, this was their evening pattern, to retreat and then reunite, sharing supper, though Helena had been working later than usual, coming to bed after him. Her language school was up for a review by the Ministry, who were reacting to rumblings from the new government. Everything was in order but she worried. The culture was punitive, the knives were out. A couple of rogue schools had put everyone under the same harsh weather. On the TV news they’d shown a man running to get into a black Mercedes, holding a newspaper over his face. Hers wasn’t a rogue school but a model one, he told her. Yet the stress still played out and perhaps finally she wasn’t wonderful at delegating. Helena held the whole enterprise in her head. It was her baby. That was a little chink in her armour. Her pride, or her voraciousness could it be called?

And in his head? His baby?

Two names he was thinking of: Tony Gorzo, naturally, and Sam Covenay, Friday’s low-light, and his first appointment at Monday’s clinic. Sam had been coming to Paddy for six weeks of speech therapy, with zero progress. From the time he’d had braces fitted on his teeth, Sam had more or less stopped speaking. He’d driven his parents insane until finally they said
he could have the braces removed but the boy didn’t want this either.

So was this the reason Paddy had bought the bike? To get things moving? That idea came to a crashing halt. In
Middlemarch
—probably his favourite novel alongside
The Magic Mountain
, which Helena had read in German—there was the salient warning. He knew the quotation almost by heart, having used it a number of times in presentations. That we all get our thoughts entangled in metaphors and act fatally on them. Everyone does this, ‘grave or light’. That was his chink, he believed.

Forget the Covenays then.

At his desk he tried to come up with a topic for his next ‘Speech Marks’ column, and immediately felt everything had been said. This was entirely normal. This was writing. And yet after eight years in the newspaper, what was left? Was this the meaning of Tony Gorzo’s silence? The reader had voted. Finito. Or, Greek, Omega. Columns of course had a natural life. His fellow columnists, though he’d never met them, demonstrated this truth. One year you’re witty, geisty, on the button, and the next you’re writing about how you hate jazz or the colour of the houses in your neighbourhood. Was he that bad? His column, a merciful follower might consider, dealt in facts, in ideas over personal opinion. Had the facts run out? This made no sense either. The world’s data was infinite. One’s ability to process, or just hang on, provided the limits. His thinking was somewhat manic, he knew. Over-available for capture.

The crook in the black Mercedes wasn’t someone Helena knew, or even knew of. She was of a different class altogether, having read Thomas Mann auf Deutsch—a for instance he’d supplied when she looked in danger of using the term
industry
colleague
as they watched the news and the man appeared a second or third time smelling the newspaper.

He looked up and saw the blank space on the wall where a picture had hung and here were the Covenays again. Alan Covenay, the father, had the picture. He ran a framing business, and was supposedly fixing it. The picture was a cartoon portrait
of Paddy in fact, a gift from the newspaper. For years the cartoon had sat on the floor in the spare room of the house he rented after his divorce from Bridget. It wasn’t until they’d moved into the apartment that he considered it again, or Helena did.

Helena’s idea was that the cartoon created a natural talking point for Paddy with new patients. ‘You could say to the kids, guess who that is?’

‘They might not believe me when I say it’s me,’ said Paddy.

‘So that’s the talking point,’ she said.

‘How we fall apart as we age?’

‘How we change, which is what you want them to do.’

He wasn’t sure that was what he did want them to do. Did you say to the child with autism, I think you need to change?

‘I think we can all change, learn, grow,’ she said. ‘I see it every day at the school.’

‘Grow?’ he said. ‘I think we can grow paunches.’

She’d laughed, but unhappily, he thought, as if his flippancy had trampled briefly, harmlessly, on an important belief. He believed in it too, though not unproblematically. He didn’t care for the coercion that often figured in the wish. It was the old psychiatrist and light bulb joke: the light bulb has to want to change. But where, for instance, did that leave civil rights, gay rights, women’s rights, animal rights, environmental activism, any of the major progressive movements on which public opinion needed more than a prod? There was an argument for force. He’d had it with Lant over the years. Yes, yes, but there was also the collection of light bulbs that came each week to sit with Paddy in his office. Over a period, under a bunch of gently does it trial and error operations, suggestions, of games and fun, they turned on, these bulbs. They began to shine. He’d seen the light. I seen the little lamp.

Lant had a coercive solution for the Covenay kid. ‘What you do is this,’ he said. ‘You walk over to him, you say, “I’m really fucking sick of this and so is everyone else”, and then you reach down and pull his ear as hard as you can, lift him up by it. You’ll never see recalcitrant vocalisation crumble so quickly.
Elective mutism? Elect this.’ Jeremy Lanting was an educational psychologist. They’d worked together in the public system when he and Paddy were both starting out.

The other slightly manicky thing was that Paddy could hear voices, very faint, through the wall, and he strained to make out more in the murmur. His mother’s radio left on? That was something she’d done for years, even before their father died—left the radio on to deter burglars. But perhaps this wasn’t it at all. Paddy had been having trouble with his right ear recently. The sounds or interference came and went according to different stimuli. The noise was a hum, a pulse, and sometimes a soft sort of boom. Weirdly, he saw something: a person leaving a room, shutting the door after him. It occurred to him that this was his father. Occasionally he’d had things like this with his father crop up.