Somebody Loves Us All (18 page)

‘I’m not.’

‘Don’t be, you know. We’ve had rain for eighteen days straight.’

‘You live in Canada.’

‘Am I ever to be forgiven for that? But then this occurred to me. She’s done it for me, this French business.’

‘How so?’

‘Because it’s one of our official languages. I could take this as a gesture on her part. She wants to come closer!’

‘She does want to come closer.’

‘Ouch, so now the cat just dug its claws in. So anyway, I got the maps, Dad’s maps. I felt your hand in that.’

‘Nothing to do with me.’

‘Do I believe that? Okay, I believe it. Top marks for Teresa. The boys took one each for their rooms. They look good. Better here than they did over there en masse. I suppose everything else is gone.’

‘A lot of stuff, yes.’

‘My fault, I guess.’

‘What is?’

‘That I wasn’t there.’

‘Jesus, Margie, you can come any time, you know that.’

‘No, that’s the thing, Paddy, I can’t. She needs a lot of notice for my arrivals and so do I. We both require a period of serious preparation. We need to draw ourselves up for even the simplest hellos. No, thinking about it, I don’t think now is the time.’

‘Fine,’ he said.

A moment passed.

‘I heard you had a change of government,’ she said.

‘Ma was one of the people who voted them out.’ She’d told him this when he was lamenting the change.

‘Really? Her parents would spin in their graves, and Dad.’

‘I can’t bear to hear their voices, the new lot.’

‘They’re all the same, the new lot, the old lot.’

‘I happen to think that’s not true,’ he said.

‘Look at the markets,’ she said. ‘The banks. It happens under anyone’s watch.’

‘And now it’s been discredited, that approach. Time for new thinking.’

‘Obama?’

‘I don’t know, maybe.’

‘One thing has happened here. On that topic. Two American families from Nathan’s school are going home.’ Nathan was son number two. ‘They came four years ago and now they can face it. They told me they can belong again. They can start to feel good about making a contribution to the grand enterprise of their place of birth. I met the mother the day after the election and she cried in the supermarket.’

‘And what about you, Margie? Any stirrings?’

She laughed. ‘It doesn’t take a world event to make me cry in the supermarket! Besides, go home to a National government? One lunatic in the family is enough.’

‘We’ll let you know how the lunatic progresses.’

‘Call me, Paddy. Any time, day or night. I’m a light sleeper, I don’t care.’

Without deciding on such a route and without Lant, though wearing his new sunglasses—the same model Lant had—Paddy found himself biking along the Hutt motorway. For his first major solo voyage it was such an obvious bad choice that he wondered what was behind it. Some wish to put himself in danger? The desire to be at the sharpest remove from help? A test of sorts? Perhaps. But it didn’t feel that calculated. He’d done the supermarket shopping in the car, delivered the stuff to his mother, who was resting in her bedroom, and then he’d biked down to Thorndon and followed the traffic without really thinking. He was curious, and then he was flying down a ramp heading north, and then he was on the motorway, following the bike as much as riding it.

That was his story.

He went unthinkingly on for perhaps ten minutes before his mind kicked in. Experienced cyclists, perhaps even a pro—he couldn’t recall the exact details—had been wiped out on this road. There’d been a campaign a few years back to change the type of marker paint used since one victim had apparently come off when his tyre slid on a freshly applied line. He went under a truck. Paddy wasn’t sure what had happened about the paint in the end but he was careful to keep off it. There was certainly no death wish in him. He felt hyper-alert in the traffic, constantly scared, grim and hostile and victimised. Every vehicle that went past seemed malicious. Some moved far out in the lane to give him the maximum space, others crushed the air between them
with either fine judgement or vicious disregard. More than a few, he was sure, passed without noticing that there was a man on a bike on the edge of the motorway. They drifted and corrected in jerks. He thought, this last category contains the person who’ll kill me, or kill someone else another day.

It was ten kilometres of this, the Hutt Valley at the end of it, that low collection of buildings and houses puddling between the hills. The Hutt, his birthplace, had never seemed such a longed-for thing but he wanted to be there at once.

Of course under normal circumstances he was heading in exactly the wrong direction.

This strip he was on, tossed up by the last big earthquake, consisting of the narrow motorway and the adjacent railway line balanced on the edge of the harbour, had figured, more or less, as a lifeline. Here was the single route of salvation, the means by which he and his friends found a world beyond high-fenced sports grounds, pennanted car yards, shampoo manufacturers, evangelical churches, the flat and wide sleeping streets they’d biked along as kids, speeding up to scare a cat walking lazily across in front of them. The Hutt, you wanted as early as possible to achieve escape velocity.

He cycled hard at first, adrenalised with rage, expecting some wild event to shatter everything. The family SUV with a kid in a car seat, a mother on a mobile phone, clipping him and sending the bike out into the far lane in flesh-tearing circles to land in the path of someone very unlucky; the courier van booming with music, driven by Leo, the name in curly script on the door, swiping Paddy into the gravel on the side of the road and carrying on to his next drop-off; a man in a Mini, looking at the harbour, collecting him from behind. Paddy glanced at his end in many forms.

It was a terrible way to bike.

He was exhausting himself in nervous fury. Most likely it would result in his falling off without anyone else to blame, striking a tree, a pillar, going into a culvert. That was how you broke your arm, your pelvis. A helicopter would come. The
irresponsibility of his actions was outrageous. He thought of Helena at the language school, scowled at by Iyob, besieged by Dora, taking the call in business mode. ‘I see, I see. Thank you for calling.’ He thought of his mother. For years of course she’d been the sole reason to head here.

He slowed down and relaxed his grip on the handlebars and evened out his pedalling. He was still afraid and the air pushed at his teeth, his eyes, but he had a little more control over everything. Normalise, this was Lant’s advice. Lift your head and seek the information of your surroundings. There’s no panic.

What was the day like?

It was sunny, mild, calm. These weren’t the conditions on the motorway while biking in fast traffic but were he to stop that would be the day in front of him. And he had the power to stop at any moment, to get off, to have a sip of water, to regard the whole enterprise from a less threatened perspective, leaning with his bike against the hillside, just out of harm’s way. His surroundings? In the harbour there were a few yachts, a motorboat pulling along a water-skier. The unit passed, three carriages, hardly anyone in them, going out to the Hutt. It surprised him how easily and rapidly he was able to take in these things. Where were the dolphins and what were they saying?

He stopped at the petrol station halfway along and had some water and his banana, looking back at the city, which was satisfyingly distant. He was proud then. When he took off his helmet, his hair stuck to it with sweat. He watched the cars pass with what instantly seemed like impossible speed and yet that was the stream that would soon be pulling him along. This was Paddy’s new idea about the motorway, that he could make himself part of its patterns and currents. Before reaching the petrol station he’d discovered a channel of air from an intercity bus and had coasted in it for several moments until it weakened, moving ahead of him. He’d seen cyclists in town, often bike couriers, holding onto the back of trucks, getting towed. On the motorway if you were good and had courage, there was the
slipstream. He lacked these qualities but even for a novice rider, doggedly in the road’s furrows, there were bonuses, surprises.

On his new glasses there was a fine spattering, tiny dots of an oily substance which vanished when he rubbed the lens across his sleeve.

He re-entered the brutal flow. He fully enjoyed none of it and came into Petone sore and dry-mouthed. His water bottle was empty. Lant said always take two bottles. His calves felt tight and his groin and backside ached. But mostly Paddy felt good, vindicated. Wellington glittered over the water, surprisingly tall, a collection of silver filing cabinets. Yes, he thought, catching the image: that is where I keep my problems. And the Hutt? The Hutt was the simple past, wasn’t it? It was cats under cars. It was boys sitting in the stands at night watching men play softball under lights. It was John Walker running around a grass track. Arsonists had burned down the stadium and his intermediate school. It was climbing the wall of the Riddiford Baths to take a midnight swim. It was men leaving the RSA holding little overnight bags in which there was a flagon of beer. They looked like burglars. And the walking jolted little burps from the men, as if they were babies.

Tony Gorzo’s bowling lanes occupied a bleak gravelly space marked by a chain-link fence between the motorway and the railway line just south of the Petone railway station. There were car parks in front of the bowling building, weeds growing through the broken concrete. A few dilapidated railway sheds sat at one end, their graffitied garage doors secured by large rusting padlocks. At the other end was a group of recycling bins surrounded by several mounds of black plastic rubbish bags that had been torn at by animals. Food scraps spilled onto the ground. A cat was eating there.

He felt very hot suddenly, a flush passing across his back and reaching his ears. This sensation left him. He’d had no trouble with his right ear on the ride.

There were perhaps a dozen cars parked outside the lanes, a flat-roofed single storey building that looked temporary, almost abandoned except for the large new-looking sign fixed above the entrance: The Bowling Place. An old beaten-up painting below this name showed a bowling family—Mum, Dad, two kids—having fun. The son had just bowled a strike and showed a raised fist while his sister was applauding madly and his parents looked at each other in amazement.
Is that our boy
? Beside them were plates of chips, drinks with striped straws. The paint was weathered and the image disrupted by lines that cut across the faces. It might have been a family portrait someone had screwed up in a temper and then tried to smooth out again in remorse. Well, that would have been Margie, except for the remorse.

It was just before eleven in the morning. He locked his bike near the front entrance, chaining it to one of the veranda poles, and went inside. The place was cool and lit oddly so that at first it was hard to make out anything much at all. Pockets of brightness mixed with areas of total dark. Music played from hidden speakers and there was the rumble of bowling balls, then the clatter of pins going down. Cabinets of trophies lined the wall near the entrance. One of these was illuminated and gleaming, while the others were unlit and he could only glimpse their contents. Cups and pennants. A statuette of a figure crouching, his bowling arm thrown up unnaturally behind him as if dislocated. Another of a man holding what Paddy thought might have been a bowling pin high above his head; he was looking up and his neck was visibly straining. These poses, adjusted by shadows and reflections off the glass, suggested briefly people suffering spasms of pain. Similarly, wooden plaques fixed between the cabinets disappeared and appeared as he walked towards the counter, which was the main source of light, a ring of coloured bulbs above the desk, red, blue and green, one or two of which were blown. The first few bowling lanes were in darkness, though the TV screen above each lane showed a single small flashing white light.

No one was at the desk. Next to the till was a computer touch-screen with a map of the lanes. A Coke can with a straw coming out of it sat beside the screen and behind the desk were shelves of bowling shoes, cubbyholes with size numbers written in black marker pen onto the wood. There was also a cardboard box on the floor marked in the same pen with the word sox. Paddy looked up and saw a security camera pointing down at him. Was Gorzo in some back room watching him? Paddy slipped off his biking shoes and held them.

At the far end, there were people bowling in the last three lanes. The place smelled of alcohol and carpet cleaner. He heard the sound of glasses being pushed into or out of a dishwasher. More pins went down and someone shouted briefly. A pair of Western-style swing-doors led through into a bar, also mainly in shadow though thin light showed the bulbs of wine glasses hanging upside down above the bronze handles of the beer pumps.

He walked along towards the occupied lanes and then sat in an armchair with broad wooden arms into which a plastic ashtray had been moulded. The wood was marked with white rings from glasses. He was almost completely in shadow. In the nearest lane two men in their sixties bowled in silence. They wore caps and white shirts with some insignia on the back. Between bowls they poured drinks from a jug of beer and watched the cartoon animations that filed across the scoring screen above their lane. A squirrel was being chased by a duck and something else, perhaps an otter.

Further along, a man of about Paddy’s age was bowling with two women, one a little older than him, one much younger. The women had to be reminded to bowl. They sat down between bowls and drank from tall glasses with straws, ignoring the man’s bowling. The man always stood. He’d set up his drink—a can of beer or something else—on a ledge above a carousel of balls just behind their booth. He moved here whenever the women were bowling, looking down towards the counter and the entrance. Paddy wasn’t sure whether the man had seen him
or not. He wore a shirt with epaulettes and the women called him Davey.

Between these two groups, a man who looked to be in his early thirties was bowling with his infant son, about four years old. The boy would carry his ball in two hands from the rack and balance it on top of a metal ramp, which his father had positioned for him in the centre of the lane. They would then discuss the best angle to go from, the boy trying to line up his ball on the ramp with the pins by pointing his arm and looking down it, squinting. The father then had to move the ramp a little. Both of them counted off the bowl and the boy would let go. Once it was gone they’d set off after it, walking almost the length of the lane, talking to the bowl, urging it on, flapping their hands to make it stay on course. Curlers did this on ice, sweeping with brooms. Near the end, the father would take his son’s hand to stop him banging his head on the board, and they’d watch the ball take out a few pins. The automatic arm swept up those ones and the pair then walked back to bowl again. Between the son’s turns, the father bowled mostly strikes. He never missed a spare. His action looked stiff but he kept hitting them. When Paddy lived in the Hutt, they sometimes went bowling but it was an upstairs room near Trentham with holes in the walls where the balls had jumped the gutters. No TV screens, no bar.

When the boy and his father were walking down the lane, the two older men stopped bowling and drank from their glasses of beer, watching impassively. The man with the two women, Davey, stood at the top of his lane with his hands on his hips in obvious disgust. He turned in Paddy’s direction and said loudly, ‘Put up with this.’

The boy had released his final bowl. Four or five went down. Father and son stood at the end of the lane and before the arm appeared, the boy stepped forward quickly and kicked at the remaining pins. He was snatched away by his father, swung in the air. ‘No,’ said the father. ‘No, no, no!’ There didn’t appear to be any real anger in the father’s voice and his son was squealing
and asking to be let down. He was laughing. ‘You’re a menace and a stranger to me!’ ‘No,’ said the boy. ‘No, I’m not!’

Paddy sat forward then, coming into a little light. What was in that voice? Slightly Americanised. The boy was American and possibly Asian, though the father wasn’t.

The older men waited. Davey, furious, went to find his drink while the women he was with glanced over at the father and his boy then returned to their conversation.

The father bent down—the same slightly awkward movement as when he’d bowled—and rehearsed a few practise swings as if about to bowl the boy down the lane. ‘Stop! Dad! Stop!’ Finally he put him down and the boy ran back to their booth to look at the screen that showed their scores. ‘I won!’ he shouted. ‘I won again!’