Somebody Loves Us All (12 page)

‘Who?’

‘I don’t know their names. It’s not my field.’

‘Right, so why are you pretending to know all this stuff?’

‘These are general observations. I thought I’d been invited to make a few of those.’

‘You weren’t invited, Lant. I asked you a simple question.
Merde
.’

‘Murder?’

‘
Merde
!
Scheisse
! Shit! You know, shit.’

‘What’s up with you, Card? What’s happening?’

‘I don’t know. Nothing. I sure don’t want to fuck my bike though. This isn’t sublimation.’

‘Everything’s sublimation.’

‘Okay, Tony Gorzo didn’t call.’

Lant looked at him. ‘Gorzo didn’t call about the column and it sends you spinning?’

‘He never misses.’

‘Maybe he’s sick.’

‘Gorzo doesn’t get sick.’

‘On holiday then.’

‘And he leaves without telling me? Once he called me from Fiji to apologise.’

‘Dead. He’s been killed. His wife did it or his son, stabbed him in his sleep.’

‘Gorzo can’t die. Impossible. Those things he smokes will make him live forever. Anyway, I’ve been looking in the paper.’

‘Looking in the paper? Why not just call him then, find out.’

‘That’s what Helena says.’

‘It would be normal advice. Call him.’

‘And show him my weakness? Anyway, I tried. Got his voicemail.’

‘Okay then, voilà, progress.’

‘Didn’t leave a message.’

Paddy stood up and walked over to where their bikes were resting under a tree. He thought of them as resting, as if they were horses, tethered there. Good boy, he said to his. Lant called out to ask what he was doing. Paddy told him they had to go. Lant looked down at his bare foot. He didn’t have his shoe on yet, he said. Paddy had strapped on his helmet and was wheeling his bike across the pebbly part of the sand towards the road. Lant was standing now, struggling with his shoe, losing his balance, swearing. Paddy heard him shouting but it hardly carried. The wind had begun to move across his ears. Paddy was away. He watched his front wheel begin to spit up
a tiny continuous fizz as if he were carving something into the road.

At certain moments it was clear to Paddy why Helena didn’t much like Jeremy Lanting though she’d never said so. She was bothered, it seemed at first, by his profession. He could be superior, Paddy knew that. Smug. Conceited. Oh yes. He dealt with a lot of violent teenagers, accomplished criminals. ‘Because he listens to terrible things all day, kids with knives making their sisters become prostitutes, I wonder if he thinks he can’t be shocked,’ Helena said one day. ‘Probably he looks at someone like me and thinks I live complacently. True enough. But how long would Jeremy last on the street? He has a season ticket for the orchestra.’

‘He doesn’t think you’re complacent,’ said Paddy. ‘Your life is full of refugees and immigrants, people who’ve risked everything and given up their homes and travelled. And these are the people who you help. He admires you tremendously. As for the orchestra tickets, I’m grateful for that because we get to use them sometimes.’

Helena thought for a moment. She might have been considering how effortlessly he’d lied on his friend’s behalf, and was deciding whether this was sweet or not. Or she might have believed him. Lant had never spoken about Helena’s working life to him. Why couldn’t he have the thoughts Paddy had given him though?

She said suddenly, ‘Why do you think he chose seats up behind the orchestra rather than down in the main auditorium?’

There was more inquiry than attack in the question, and the promise of a fresh direction. It was a quality in her conversation Paddy enjoyed, the ability to move around rapidly. She was never stuck. ‘It’s a great view,’ he said.

‘Where you lose the soloists. They play with their backs to you.’

Soloing was their word for masturbating, which of course wasn’t what she meant here. The appellation could have disastrous results, as in the time they both had to leave an
orchestra concert—thank you, Lant—when a visiting Russian pianist plainly adjusted his crotch prior to the opening bars and Helena whispered to Paddy that they were watching a great soloist. He put this from his mind now. He said, ‘But you see almost inside the orchestra. You stare into the great machine. You see how the parts are all working. The musicians, they can look totally unconnected, looking inside their instruments and fiddling around, pulling bits off, then preparing to blow for two bars or something. You see them getting ready. How they exchange little looks with each other. The timpanist swallowing a sneeze.’

She appeared grateful to have left behind the direct subject of his friend. ‘I always miss those things. They seem a bit bored to me, the musicians. Or just prosaic. A woman plays an extraordinary piece on the trumpet and then she tips the spit out on the floor.’

‘I love it when she does that!’

‘Yes, maybe that’s the difference between us. I don’t need to see the spit. Oh, it’s all interesting but I prefer to close my eyes.’

‘And fall asleep.’

‘And concentrate on the music.’ She looked carefully at him. ‘And fall asleep.’ Helena laughed. Her face in repose was surprisingly serious, her chin pointed purposefully, the lips set more tightly than she meant perhaps, her brow showing concentration; yet there was the sense of parody too, as if she didn’t quite believe in such earnestness but had learned to do it. With her glasses on, she looked like a university professor, though better dressed. When she laughed the reward was terrific, a huge, lighted expression, a wide and white and perfectly corrected set of teeth, the eyes brilliantly brown.

‘You’ve fallen asleep to some of the greatest music in the canon,’ said Paddy.

‘I begin with good intentions. Anything with a flute in it, I drift off.’

‘And very loud drums. Was it Tchaikovsky?’

‘They soothe me, drums.’

‘Mmm, something from the womb perhaps.’

‘I was an emergency Caesarean, born with the cord badly tangled. It took them twenty seconds to get me breathing. It was touch-and-go.’

‘I was born in the afternoon, then I let my mother sleep.’ How simply they slipped into these riffs on all they’d done and seen.

‘I had colic the first eight weeks.’

‘She always had to wake me up to feed me.’

‘What was wrong with you?’ said Helena.

‘I loved to sleep. I loved my blankets.’

‘You remember your blankets?’

‘I have a sense of them, yes,’ said Paddy. ‘The silky bit stitched on the top of the blanket which pressed against my cheek.’

‘How extraordinary.’

‘Oh, I think being a baby was sort of a highlight for me. Of my life.’

‘You were the perfect baby.’

‘I was,’ he said. ‘That was before my mother became Cleopatra.’

His sense was that Helena didn’t much care for his friend because he pre-dated her so completely and because they tended to communicate in a manner she almost certainly found annoying. Lant. Paddy was Card. Patrick, Card-Trick, Card—somehow. She’d never worked in a hospital. It was like going back to high school: nicknames, sexual depravity, problems with the toilets. Her language school was very grown-up in comparison. It was a serious business, learning the language that would help you survive. Studious people with bottles of water in the side-pockets of their backpacks reading the notices on the noticeboard by pressing their fingers under each word.

When Lant visited, she usually left them alone after a few minutes.

Back at the apartment Paddy met Geoff Harley in the lift. The doors opened and his neighbour stood there, carrying a box. He said he was on his way to the basement. He moved aside and Paddy wheeled his bike into the lift.

Paddy was sweating and sore, still wearing his helmet. He’d come in a hundred metres ahead of Lant. However, in a move designed to rob the moment of any satisfaction, when he’d checked behind, Lant was coasting, not holding the handlebars at all but with his arms folded, looking about the streets as if he’d never been engaged with him. How long had he been like this? Did he do it when he knew he couldn’t catch him? Or had he eased up to give Paddy his victory? At Seatoun Beach Paddy had certainly provided sufficient reason to think his self-esteem needed a boost. Then why grandstand it with the arms folded? In fact Lant had a great professional scepticism around the whole issue of self-esteem. He thought its promotion created unreal expectations. Quite a lot of us, he’d told Paddy, had good reason to think not very highly of ourselves. More than once he’d offered that the Covenay kid, far from being deficient in confidence, probably harboured a champion cast-iron ego.

When they parted outside Paddy’s building, Lant shook his hand in a suspiciously warm congratulatory manner. ‘Did you see the dolphins?’ he said.

‘Yes,’ Paddy lied.

‘Did you see them? Were they feeding or something?’

‘I think so.’

‘I’ve never seen them so close in before.’

‘Yeah,’ said Paddy. All he’d been doing was keeping his eyes on the road and on his wheel. They could have been biking through one long tunnel.

Lant lifted his special glasses off. ‘So how do you feel now?’

‘I could throw up,’ said Paddy.

‘There’s a pocket for that.’

‘A self-cleaning one I hope.’

Lant laughed and put his glasses back on. ‘Tell me, what are they saying, the dolphins, when they talk to each other? What
do the noises mean? Is it talking as such? Is it stuff about the tides, the presence of a school of mackerel they fancy? “This is a nice bay we’re in, isn’t it?” “Weren’t we here last year?” They’re social creatures, right? It’s not a million miles from the chatter of chimps, I think. But what do we know, Card? What are they saying?’ He was obviously making his speech as long as possible to demonstrate control of his heart rate, his oxygen.

‘Who am I, Dr Dolittle?’

‘No, but come on.’

‘A lot of it is conjecture.’

‘Conject away.’

‘Lant, I have sweat running into my underpants.’

‘You’re wearing underpants?’

‘Oh please. The guy at the bike shop never said anything about that either.’

‘It’s a personal choice area.’

‘Dolphins test their environments with sonic squeaks.’

‘Right, how deep the water is, where the rocks are.’

‘As far as emotional affect, no one’s sure. There’s been work done on happiness—’

‘Happiness again!’

‘—the sound of happiness. Pitch, volume et cetera. Whether there’s even a melody, a tune for certain states. Most of the studies are done in captivity. There was some evidence that loneliness had a distinct sonic pattern.’

‘Sad dolphin.’

‘That in an aquarium, a dolphin which had lost its long-time performing partner was saying or singing a different tune, if you like. Of course a lot of this stuff is anecdotal. Trainers hearing new sounds, reporting changes. But then you map it through computer analysis and the graphs show no change. Look, I’m no expert.’

‘People want the dolphin to be grief-stricken so badly, they imagine they’re hearing the sad notes. Fascinating.’

‘Or the software for registering such things is just not subtle enough.’

Lant nodded, slipped his feet into both pedals of his bike and held it steady. ‘You’re in the top bracket, Card,’ he said.

‘Oh, please not now. Don’t try to repair the damage.’

‘What damage is this though?’

‘It’s nothing,’ said Paddy. ‘It’s the periodic wave of profound self-doubt that washes over us every so often and gives us the sensation that all our beliefs and values exist untested and that we live in a state of extreme vulnerability.’

‘I’ve heard of it,’ said Lant. He reached out and squeezed Paddy’s shoulder. ‘Sad dolphin.’ Paddy became aware that Lant was using him to stay upright and he pulled away. For a moment Lant wobbled and almost fell. Then he straightened. ‘Nasty dolphin,’ he said. He biked in a circle around Paddy.

‘So next time we see you,’ said Paddy, ‘you’ll be on stage.’

‘What are you talking about?’

‘Your great gig at the school.’ Stephanie had told him about it weeks before. Lant’s band was going to play as part of a fundraiser at the school her oldest girl attended. Lant’s daughter went there too.

‘You’re not coming, are you?’ Lant looked suddenly concerned.

‘Thought I might.’

‘Some little school thing, I don’t even know if we’re playing.’

‘Anyway, I’ll be there. I promised Steph.’

At the lift Paddy had had no intention of putting his bike in the lock-up, not yet. He was going up. Geoff Harley somehow had persuaded him, or Paddy had simply followed a lead, taken an opportunity. A surprising amount of life was like this. A door opens and we step inside. It was something Lant would offer. On the ride home Paddy had been thinking of Sam Covenay again. His feeling was he’d trapped himself in the pose of The Boy Who Won’t Speak. Perhaps the solution was not to try to break that but to offer him a new role, a fresh pose, to replace
the self-defeated performance not with a simple return to the happy twelve-year-old Sam—he wasn’t twelve, he wasn’t that person any more—but with something as interesting, as radical as his current title.

To have had these thoughts—no matter how misguided they might turn out to be—to have created the mental space while biking, was suddenly extraordinary to Paddy. He’d failed to see the dolphins not because he was hopeless, or not only that, but because he was thinking, working almost. At some point on the homeward leg, the pain must have been managed. It was a tunnel but not an empty or uninteresting one, and if Paddy had set out hoping to eradicate all thought with pure action, he was returning strangely full of ideas. The nausea too was passing. His ear didn’t hurt though it was surprisingly cold. For the first time Paddy felt reconciled to the bike. Everything else he’d done—leaving the bike in the hallway, oiling the chain at night, encouraging Sam to think about it—had been preparatory. Here was the thing. It was coming. He’d moved from wishful to actual, it seemed.

‘I didn’t know you were a biker,’ said Geoff.

‘It’s all new,’ said Paddy, regretting it at once.