Somebody Loves Us All (11 page)

‘So, like—no warning signs, nothing?’ said Gorzo.

Before he died the worst thing his father had were varicose veins. Then kapow. Kapow? Paddy might have cried his eyes out then on the phone. Instead he began laughing. Not because of the varicose veins but because of the absurd way he and Tony Gorzo were finding their way through all this. His impression was that Tony Gorzo listened to his laughing with a completely straight face; perhaps he’d even be concerned. Some people didn’t laugh and he thought Tony was one of them. But he listened. Paddy believed the other man thought Paddy was terribly lonely and unhappy and he was the only real human contact he had. It wasn’t the truth but it gave their conversations a necessary freedom, a sort of wildness and spontaneity that soon came to be something like fondness. Anyway, he rang the next time.

‘When are you going to stop writing in the paper?’

‘Never,’ said Paddy. ‘You’re going to have to read me for years. Tell me about Jimmy.’

‘Why’d you ever give him the power of speech if all he ever does is ask for money?’

They talked for a bit, and then Gorzo said, ‘What’s the next subject of the column?’ Paddy told him that was always a surprise. ‘Create suspense,’ he said.

‘That’s right,’ said Paddy.

‘But I hate suspense, will he, won’t he. Just give me it straight, I say.’

The day he found the room full of pillows at the hospital, Paddy had been trying to avoid seeing one of his colleagues who had some kind of boring administrative task for him. He’d simply opened a door and walked in. The pillows weren’t bagged or covered in plastic slips; they formed a mound which took up more than two-thirds of the floor and which was higher than the windows. The pillows were clearly used, perhaps on their way
out or being stored prior to reconditioning. There were always circulars about re-using things, avoiding waste. The pillows were grey, minus their pillowcases, and many of them carried stains. It was impossible not to see turning heads, suffering heads, the heads of all those people who can’t properly sleep, who sit up suddenly in the middle of the night to say things of great urgency to people who aren’t there.

His sister Margie had once told him she couldn’t look at a bed without wanting to lie down and go to sleep in it. No matter if she was tired or not, she felt the urge. At dinner parties she had to avoid catching sight of beds.

Certainly for Paddy right then it was not a question of lying down among the many pillows. He moved quickly on, down another corridor, looking to get away. The hospital was a great place to hide.

At two forty in the morning, Helena sat bolt upright in bed and announced a word he didn’t understand. Was it a word? A demonstration of the glottal stop? Perhaps it was Arabic, connected with their talk earlier, her problems at the school. She hadn’t been able to tell him about giving her daughter the job. Hadn’t been able to say the name Dora to him. Some therapists believed nocturnal speech was revelatory in this manner: asleep we spoke what we were unable to awake. It sounded a little like someone clearing her throat. Or the action we make after swallowing an insect. A raspy word of great importance to her since she declared it with complete conviction. She seemed content once it was out. Whatever it was, the moment had a different quality to her usual gastric outbursts, and she’d not held her chest. He asked whether she was all right and she looked at him without surprise, smiled dreamily, and lay down again to sleep. A few moments later he heard her sipping from her water glass.

In the morning she had no memory of it. She said she hadn’t slept well and she didn’t feel like eating. He made her a cup of
tea. Perhaps she was getting a cold, Paddy suggested. The stress of the school inspection. Brusquely, she rejected this. ‘I had a dream I was with my mother at some sort of market overseas.’ Helena’s mother had died before they’d met. ‘I was trying to buy a belt. My jeans were too big for me and I needed a belt. I was the age I am now, about. So my mother was handing me these belts and pulling them around my waist, tightening them, seeing if they fitted. Except she was choosing smaller and smaller belts. And she was yanking them tighter and tighter. Almost cutting me in half.’

‘I see,’ he said. He didn’t know what to say.

She sipped her tea, looked at her watch. Her work bag was already on the kitchen table. She opened it, took out her mobile phone, regarded it unhappily and put it back again. She looked annoyed it hadn’t rung. ‘The old parent tries to strangle the child routine, huh?’

‘But the belt was around your waist. Can you strangle someone by doing up their belt?’

She shrugged and walked out, leaving her mug on the table, something she never did. She always rinsed it and put it in the dishwasher. She’d not put a coaster under it either. He heard her in the bathroom, brushing her teeth with the electric toothbrush. Paddy had stopped using his because it gave him the low-volume sound for an hour or more afterwards in his right ear. This was one of the stimuli he’d identified. Helena had told him to get the ear checked but he hadn’t. There was no hearing impairment, no pain. Self-diagnosing, he queried mild otitis media.

When Helena walked back in, ready to leave, he said, ‘What did Max do?’

‘Who’s Max?’

‘Your husband, Max. What was his job when you were married?’

‘Diving coach,’ she said. She continued to appear irritated by something. ‘Why?’

‘I’d forgotten what he did. Diving, right.’

‘That was a lifetime ago. What are you thinking of him for? Sometimes it seems like it never happened that whole episode.’

‘You have a daughter by him.’

‘And she’s a constant surprise.’

‘You gave her a job.’

‘Temporary, very temporary.’

‘Also you told me the other day about getting Max layered up in grease for his naked slide down the mountain.’

‘Near naked, he was wearing pants.’

‘Anyway, you’d placed him in my mental field.’

‘That was connected to the diving, I think.’ She left to do something else and came back again. ‘But Paddy, what about Teresa? She’s over this bug, right?’ It was said in the manner of, don’t bother correcting me, please, I require simplicity and obedience, and not because you are my inferior but because I’m stressed and you can help me.

‘I think so. I’ll check on her this morning.’ He helped her by again not saying more.

They were moving towards the door now. ‘How did that boy go yesterday?’ she said.

He saw again that she was trying to be normal. He was touched for one second. Then this pained him somehow. He didn’t want them to be trying to be things.

‘Sam?’ He thought of that odd moment at the door when he’d brushed past Paddy—he couldn’t say ‘reached out’. He couldn’t start telling Helena now about that. It needed some different space, that story. He’d rush it. She wouldn’t be able to take it in. Perhaps it was momentous. ‘Oh, you should have heard us. We talked and talked,’ said Paddy.

‘Really? No. Okay. Well. Maybe try the belt trick.’

‘I’ll strangle him into speech.’

She smiled at this. He was pleased. Her straight even teeth showed. Yes, she’d had braces too, he remembered, and they’d worked. Then her bag began to ring and she pulled out her phone. In doing so, she knocked her knee lightly against his bike. ‘Fuck,’ she said. The bike began to slide down the wall and
Paddy caught it as she skipped out of its way. She bent to inspect her trousers, brushing at the spot. She pushed a button on the phone and they kissed hurriedly across the bike. He watched her walk the length of the corridor, talking to someone, still flicking at her knee.

A slight far-off booming had also entered his right ear. As a trial, and perhaps even in response to Margie in the boat when they were kids, he stamped his foot on the floor to see if it helped. Nope.

From the apartment he rang his mother but it went to message. He texted her. Did she want to go out for coffee that morning?

He rubbed at his ear and shook his head but the slight fuzzing remained, a watery sibilance accompanying his every step. Perhaps he’d been too close to Helena’s electric toothbrush both the previous night and that morning. She usually had the bathroom door closed. Was it enough now to be within hearing range for the effect to take hold? He’d once had what he thought was a repetitive strain injury along his wrist until he traced it to a new razor he’d bought which used a battery to vibrate the blades. Small things, small things. The Harleys came to mind, with their micro-interactions.

Over the next hour, Paddy listened to his own ear. He read things. A box from Amazon had arrived. He’d totally forgotten ordering the book, which turned out to be a biography of Churchill. Why? Part of his wandering research into speech patterns of the famous? He had a folder on his computer. Lawmakers were an interesting subset. Thomas Jefferson’s lisp. Robert Kennedy’s spasmodic dysphonia. Moses. Moses, who hates public speaking, is speaking to God. How is anyone going to listen to me, who am of uncircumcised lips? Because he’d burnt his mouth as a child, causing him to lisp, was a theory. He’d heard a paper on it once. Norman Shelley was the name of the actor said to have impersonated Churchill for the BBC. He’d taken out his own false teeth to mimic Churchill’s impediment. Paddy understood he was delaying.

In the phonebook he looked up the number for Tony Gorzo’s
bowling lanes in the Hutt. Perhaps Paddy had offended him in some way? Yet when he replayed their last conversation, which had been about nasal resonance, he was sure there was nothing in it that had gone wrong. They’d finished the call on the same friendly terms. Gorzo had repeated the same thing he always used, ‘Don’t tell me the subject of the next column, will you, Pat. Let me stew here for a fortnight.’

‘I’ll let you sweat it,’ said Paddy.

‘I’m a nervous wreck,’ he said and hung up.

Paddy rang the number. His call went straight to voicemail. He hung up. If Gorzo didn’t want the contact any more, fine. He knew where Paddy was. Sometimes you have a lot to do with a person and then, for no reason, the connection is lost. He had people in his life like that, everyone did. Tony Gorzo had appeared from nowhere and he’d gone back into that place.

That afternoon he met Lant outside the apartment building for their ride together. Paddy, wheeling his bike, walked towards his friend on his cleated shoes, toes pointing upwards, in his shorts and shirt and jacket. He wore his fingerless gloves like someone from Charles Dickens, a pickpocket. His helmet. Paddy felt sleek, vaguely Italian. An Italian pickpocket. The bike went forward alongside him on no more than the lightest pressure from a single guiding hand. He was aware of the hairs on his legs. It wasn’t a warm day. He’d been told not to wait for nice weather to bike in. They lived in Wellington. You just got out in it. What if it rained? he’d asked Lant. You put a tiny umbrella in your pouch, he said. Really? said Paddy. No, said Lant.

‘Look,’ said Lant, ‘the duck who can ride a bicycle.’

‘Shut up,’ said Paddy. ‘I’m in no mood for the sort of self-deprecatory humour I’ve formerly indulged in with you.’

Lant looked at him closely and got on his bike. His outfit was red, predominantly, whereas Paddy’s was blue. Did red mean something, something better? Had Lant tricked him into buying bunny blue? ‘Okay,’ he said, ‘so you ready to put some k’s on that baby?’

‘Is that the way we talk now?’

Lant rode forward slowly, adjusting something on his bike, looking at his legs. Did he shave his legs? ‘Let’s ride!’

Paddy stepped into his pedals, clicking the shoes into place. By the time he looked up Lant was far off down the road. ‘Bastard,’ he said, starting after him. ‘Bastard!’

Some days you had the legs for it and some days you didn’t. Lant had also told him this. It was the mystery of biking. ‘Fuck, it’s the mystery of life,’ he said. Lant saying this, and Paddy remembering it, wasn’t the reason Paddy felt as he now did. Something bitter was passing through him, like a mild flu. A vague impatience. A generalised wish for progress. Let’s go.

Today Paddy had the legs for it. They were going around the bays, all the way to Seatoun and back. But there’d be hill work thrown in. Up to Hataitai, then down again. He overtook Lant going past the New World supermarket. Lant laughed. ‘Two more hours to go, shitbrain!’ he called out.

They met a headwind. It watered the eyes. Beside Paddy, the sea sucked against the rocks. There was the smell of seaweed. Cars passed in moments of sudden noise and disturbed air. A small truck rocked the bike, causing it to snake, then settle. Paddy almost hit the curb.

By the time they turned up towards Hataitai, Lant was back on his tail. Then Paddy missed the right gear, nearly lost his chain, and Lant went ahead. Paddy caught him about halfway up, at the steepest point. Paddy was out of his seat, pushing the bike from side to side. Lant’s technique was probably smarter. Of course it was, Jesus. He stayed in the saddle. His bike scarcely deviated. His feet made nice arcs. Paddy’s thigh muscles ached and he could feel the phlegm drying around his mouth. Was he grunting? Probably. Still he went away from Lant, pushing two corners ahead. His toes were jamming hard against the ends of the shoes, which he knew shouldn’t be happening, and he was gripping the handlebars so tightly a cramp shot along one arm forcing him to release for a second. He lost power. Whatever rhythm he’d had now disappeared. He made the mistake of checking over his shoulder. Lant had popped up behind him, still a corner back but gaining. Lant had his head down. His bike was steady. Air entered Paddy’s open mouth, stinging his throat. He tried closing his mouth but that felt too constricting. He needed everything open, everything pulling.

It wasn’t a race. It had never been a race. Lant’s stylish and
persistent riding was hugely aggravating. He was provoking Paddy, who shook out his hand again on the cramping arm and pressed more heavily with his legs on the downward stroke of the pedals, trying to imagine the correct version of the man he’d seen on the bike shop computer, the perfect horizontal at the apex of each push, the elbows lined up, the shoulders relaxed, the weight going neatly forward. A bullet not a duck.

His side hurt.

He heard a car coming up the hill behind them. Their bikes were going not much faster than walking speed.

Twenty yards ahead someone was trying to parallel park. A woman carrying a baby and a baby-seat waited on the footpath for the person in the car to complete the manoeuvre. But the car wasn’t in properly and it was coming out of its park, angling across the narrow road.

It was hard to hear with the helmet on and the wind rushing past. Paddy thought perhaps Lant had called out to him. The car coming up the hill must have almost passed Lant but Paddy didn’t want to look back and lose power again. He had momentum once more. The top of the hill was a couple of bends away. What was so urgent that he had to call it out now? He was the sort of person who’d do anything to win, Lanting. He was a psychologist.

The woman with the baby was looking in Paddy’s direction. He saw the baby lift its head. How old was it? Five, six weeks? Very small, with a ball-shaped uncovered head, startlingly round. It was turning, looking for something. The baby had no words but only a sense that this was the direction to turn in. Paddy came closer and saw its mouth open. Mouth, nipple. Communication didn’t get any clearer than that. We’d all started there. Even Lant. The mother was watching Paddy.

The gap ahead in the road opened a little as the reversing car made another move into its park. Paddy swung his bike out over to the far right-hand side. He could sense the car behind him coming very close. But where was it going? Nowhere. It would have to wait for the other car. Paddy had the road. Paddy had the machine.

The driver of the reversing car saw Paddy now—an older man, in his seventies, the baby’s grandfather perhaps—and he stopped, unsure what Paddy was doing or where the front of his car was in relation to the bike. He was letting Paddy past. Paddy tried to acknowledge this, smile, present some gesture of gratitude. He was only a couple of feet from the car window. The man had no idea about Lant in his racing red, urging on this whole show. Paddy’s look was supposed to express some of this. How important it was to pass him now without stopping. A friendly, firm nod to indicate he was doing the right thing. Stay there Grandad.

Probably the driver saw only a grimace, a look of desperation, strain. Paddy was pleading, demented, dangerous. He was the biker he’d write to the paper about, the paper in which Paddy’s column appeared. Paddy was a figure of increasing concern. He was thoughtless. He would be involved in a serious accident. Paddy could hurt himself, which was fine, what mattered were the innocent people caught up in such moments of idiocy. ‘My granddaughter, six weeks old, was almost involved in this piece of thoroughly avoidable madness.’

Paddy did feel a bit mad.

Then a car appeared in front of them, coming down the road too fast. This had probably been Grandad’s point. Paddy was moving around the halted car. The downhill driver had to pull up with a sudden jolt. Paddy saw his body rock forward and slam back in his seat. Jerk was travelling too fast. The driver sounded his horn, threw his arms up inside the car: what the hell! His voice was muffled and far-off in his car. This time Paddy kept his head down. They had nothing to say. He biked on. He could see the top.

At Seatoun, they sat on the beach watching the interisland ferry slide past in what appeared to be about six feet of water.

Lant had beaten him by three minutes.

Against the muted backdrop of grey cloud, dark speckled
sea, brown grasses, metallic-dull sand, Paddy thought they must have appeared, in their bright biking clothes, garish and showy. Visible from the ferry. Beaconish. The ferry itself was luminous, hugely white and gleaming. They seemed joined to it somehow in their vivid declarations.

‘It’s not a race,’ Lant told him.

‘I know,’ said Paddy.

Lant flexed his leg in front of them. He’d taken one shoe off to pick at something. Sand clung to his long toes. ‘The reason I went past you on the flat was because I wanted to stretch out a bit, see how the bike was handling,’ he said.

‘Right,’ said Paddy. His toes ached but he didn’t want to take off his shoes. He didn’t want there to be a comparison made between Lant’s toes and his own, even a silent one. Paddy knew his weren’t long like Lant’s but that wasn’t the whole point. He felt the need to remain as separate in his actions from Lant as he could. Paddy was refusing to unzip his jacket since Lant had done that. He’d taken off his gloves when he saw Lant hadn’t. Paddy said, ‘The reason I went past you on the hill …’

‘Yes?’ said Lant.

‘Was to bury your conceited and padded ass. Which I did.’

‘You almost got knocked off too.’

‘Did I? Was that how it looked from behind?’

Lant laughed sourly. ‘There were children watching that.’

‘It was a baby. They can’t focus.’

‘Now you’re accurately assessing the age of that infant from where you were on your bike on the road?’ Lant lay back on the sand, shaking his head. Then he reached into a pocket somewhere—Paddy had noticed Lant’s outfit was subtly different from his own, superior in clever, unostentatious ways—and took out a pair of sunglasses that he put on to look at the overcast sky.

‘Where did
they
come from?’ said Paddy.

The sunglasses curved neatly across his face. Wraparounds usually made the wearer seem cheap, mean. These were shaped elegantly, sportily. They made clean lines of Lant’s cheekbones.

‘Did your eyes start stinging in the wind when we went around by the sea?’ said Lant.

‘Yes.’

‘That was salt carried by the wind.’

‘They really stung.’

‘These help.’

‘Why didn’t you tell me about getting glasses before?’

He sat up again, took the glasses off, and offered them to Paddy. ‘You could wear them on the way home.’

‘I don’t want to wear them.’

‘Wear them, try them.’ He held the glasses closer to Paddy.

‘No, you keep them, they’ll be covered in salt now.’

‘They’re made of a compound that repels all that, maintaining a clear surface. Self-cleaning.’

‘You believed that? They’re self-cleaning? Nothing’s self-cleaning, not even self-cleaning ovens.’ They did seem extremely clean.

Lant shrugged and lay back down again. ‘These aren’t the reason I beat you, you know. They aren’t magic glasses. I beat you because I’m more experienced and smarter than you, Card.’

‘I’m glad we sorted that out.’

The ferry slipped around the corner, heading into the ferocious Strait. The northerly had changed to southerly a few days before. Paddy pulled on his gloves.

‘Do you remember Dave Marshall?’ said Lant. ‘Obstetrics? I used to ride with Dave. Trouble was the pattern of our commitment tended in opposing directions. He couldn’t make it a lot of the time, and then I couldn’t. We were always cancelling, trying to reschedule. It was really annoying. So I said to him, “Dave, what’s up this time?” And he tells me he’d got to see, let’s call her Alison, I’ve forgotten exactly. Got to see Alison. “So we’ll make it earlier, yes?” But no, he had to see Alison. So I figured it out. I wanted to bike more when I was
in
a relationship. He was less keen when he was seeing someone. To have a girlfriend was for him an act of devotion, he was
consumed by that and everything else fell away. Whereas for me it was an act of celebration to bike. It was an extension of—well, let’s not muck around here, fucking. I was energised. But Dave only biked if he couldn’t fuck. In a way we were both humping our bikes, weren’t we?’

‘They didn’t talk about this at the bike shop,’ said Paddy. ‘If they had, I might not be here now.’

‘Dave biked doggedly, a hunched man trying to get through the dark times. You know what his favourite ride was? Uphill. He liked to be in pain.’

‘So I’m Dave Marshall? I beat you on one hill climb and you want it that I’m sexually frustrated and masochistic? It’s a long bow, Dr Lanting.’

‘No conclusions drawn. But something in that ride just now reminded me of Dave. You both have heavy thighs. But no, wait, you’re different too. You have a girlish bottom.’

Why on earth had he confessed that to his friend? Paddy picked up a handful of gravel and threw it at Lant, who ducked.

‘Hey, whatsa matter? You’re a happy man, you told me. Woman of your dreams, nice place to live.’

‘I am happy.’

‘Good.’

‘Listen,’ said Paddy, ‘the mistake people make is they think happy is one shade.’

‘Okay.’

‘But happy is a range, it’s a—scale.’

‘And right now, you’re at the other end—of happy.’ Lant sat up again, taking off his glasses and examining the lenses. ‘Okay, fine, all I care about really is having a stable riding partner, someone who says yes more than no. So far so good, Card. Fortunately for you too, I’m rarely alone at night.’

Paddy drank from his water bottle. There was still the plasticky taste of a new bottle.

‘Lant, how good do you think I am?’

‘At biking?’

‘Not at biking, no.’

‘In what way then? Morally?’

‘Professionally. How good at my job am I? Do you think I’m one of the top speech therapists?’

‘In Wellington, you mean?’

‘Go as wide as you like.’

‘In the country? How many speech therapists are there in the country?’

‘Doesn’t matter. Put me somewhere. You know I’ve given papers in Australia. One time in the States.’

‘Australasia now? America? I think I need the numbers.’

‘Why?’

‘Establish the mean.’

‘Forget the numbers. Am I in the top bracket?’

‘Yes,’ said Lant. ‘Depending on the size of the bracket. Yes. Definitely.’

‘The size of the bracket? What size?’

‘I don’t know, you won’t give me the numbers.’

‘I’ve written a fucking newspaper column for years.’

‘Syndicate the column is my advice, Card. I’ve always said that.’

‘So I’m not in the top?’

‘There’s a smaller bracket, I guess, a tiny number, above your bracket. These would be therapists of great prominence. The theorists of it all perhaps, rather than your practitioners. These would be the thinkers.’