Somebody Loves Us All (19 page)

‘Win something from me pretty soon,’ said Davey.

Then the boy raced past Paddy and through the swing-doors. Paddy heard other doors open and close behind him.

The father looked at the screen, carrying a ball. He took a few steps and let it go without much effort or care. The ball took out eight pins. He picked up two glasses from the table at their booth, used a paper serviette to wipe the table, and walked in the direction of the counter.

Davey stepped forward and stopped the man from going past. ‘Make it hard to concentrate,’ he said.

‘Pardon me?’

‘Rules are keep off the lanes. You and the kid are in my line of sight all the time. Paid for bowling. You want to have playtime, that’s a different place.’

‘I’m sorry, sir. It’s his birthday today. He gets everything he wants.’

‘Does he get everything I want too? I wanted to go bowling.’

The two women were calling for Davey to stop talking and come over. Paddy realised they were drunk and had been for some time.

‘If you feel we affected your game, I’m going to throw in a free one, sir. How about that?’

The man called Davey looked carefully around himself as if suspecting a trick. ‘Free game?’

The father looked in the direction of the screen above Davey’s lane, checking the numbers. ‘Sir, you feel a little boy made a mess of your game, I’m giving you the free game. He really messed your game, I think that’s fair. He’s five years old today.’

The women had stood up and were listening now. Their man wasn’t so sure of his ground any more. He was hesitating. ‘No,’ said Davey. ‘He didn’t mess it up too much. We don’t have time for another one anyway.’

‘Five years old, sir.’

Davey put his can back on the ledge above the balls.

‘Drinks to be kept in the booth, that’s a rule, sir.’

Davey picked up his can and moved back to the booth and the women. He said something and one of the women, the younger one, laughed loudly.

Paddy stood up as the father passed him. ‘Hello Jimmy,’ he said. ‘It’s Patrick Thompson. You may not remember me.’

‘Look at this!’ he said. He hadn’t seen Paddy on the chair and he stepped back in appraisal. He stared a moment, and then he had it. ‘Why don’t I remember you, Mr Thompson? I was going to be a retard except for you.’

‘And here you are.’

‘Here I am, now I get to be polite to retards.’
Raytards
.

Paddy was holding his bike shoes and Jimmy immediately said, reaching for them, ‘What size do you take?’

‘Tens,’ said Paddy.

He went behind the desk where he dumped the glasses. Then he put a pair of black bowling shoes on the counter.

‘I’m not here to play,’ said Paddy.

Jimmy shrugged. ‘You’ll be more comfortable walking around.’

Jimmy Gorzo lived in Sacramento, California where he worked in civil engineering, mainly railway-related. Paddy knew this.
He skied in the winter. He’d travelled to Japan to study bridges in earthquakes. He heated his swimming pool with solar panels he designed himself. The Christmas cards, then the phone calls, had given Paddy his history, of which his parents were deeply proud and just a little suspicious. Tony wondered about America. He didn’t wonder about its politics or its violence. He wondered whether in the end it was a serious country. He’d met many Americans, nice people, but vacant in some way, he thought. Missing something. And those
voices
. He had a sensitivity to American voices, especially the women. ‘They grate. I couldn’t listen to that for long.’ They’d spoken about this one time following a column Paddy had written about regional accent variation across New Zealand. Tony basically thought he was making it all up. We all sound the same here, he told Paddy.

Jimmy now called himself James and on his business card he’d added an initial though he didn’t have a middle name. It was ‘R’ but when they asked him what it stood for, he said he didn’t know. What, he didn’t know his own name? But it was a made-up name anyway, Jimmy said. It was ‘R’, the sign of someone filled out and meaning business. It was whatever you wanted it to be. That, for Tony, was a decidedly American touch.

R for real dumb, Tony said.

Paddy sat in the bowling shoes—thin-soled, almost slippers—and listened to Tony’s son tell him about his life. He needed little prompting. Of course Paddy was interested in how he sounded. James Gorzo had picked up a few of the politeness markers—the
sirs
, the
pardon mes
—and he pronounced his vowels with greater emphasis. But his birthplace was there in his mouth, and more significantly so was the accident all those years ago when he’d had to learn to talk again. The combined effect wasn’t too far off some sort of American. There wasn’t a sign of his old trick of waiting for someone else to supply the lost word, but he drawled a little. Paddy remembered that when Jimmy was at university some people still thought he had an intellectual disability. A girl in one class offered to take his lecture notes for him, Tony had told him. Perhaps in California James had the
perfect cover for the slight slowness and elongation, the added care. They might consider him a transplant from somewhere south-west on their own continent.

They were sitting in his father’s office, a small room behind the bar with a window looking out onto the motorway. There was a kitchen too and he’d glimpsed an elderly woman stacking plates. Paddy had a glass of Sprite and James had a Coke. James had poured these from the nozzles at the bar, shooting the glasses as if he had a gun, which made Adam, his son, laugh and shout, ‘Do it again!’

‘Want me to do it again?’

‘Yeah! Shoot ’em again!’

So he did. The drink overflowed the glasses, frothing through the metal grate. Adam wanted it a third time but his father wiped the glasses down and told him the show was over.

In the office, Adam played a game on the computer and took sips from his father’s drink. Paddy hadn’t known about Adam but it turned out he was new. James was on his honeymoon. He’d married Sue, a physiotherapist he’d met in January in Sacramento when he was having one of his regular back sessions. He went in, he said, with chronic pain and now he had a wife and a child! They’d arrived in the country two weeks ago, having been married the day before the flight. It was all a surprise—not just the visit but also the marriage, Sue, Adam, the works. ‘I hadn’t really gotten around to the whole disclosure thing. Then we thought, this will be our gift!’

Paddy considered how well this would have gone down with Dad, and he admired the son’s nerve in attempting it. He’d always been brave, tenacious. In the hospital he’d wanted Paddy to stay longer each session, asking to be pushed harder, given tougher exercises. Jimmy turned up the cassette-radio to make it more difficult. He practised shaping his mouth, positioning his tongue, making the sounds until sweat ran down his face, but he wanted more.

‘Because we were thinking of what gift to bring.’

‘For whom?’ said Paddy.

‘Okay, sorry. My grandmother. She turns one hundred next week. The big century!’

Paddy remembered the time Tony had kept the grandmother from Jimmy’s hospital bed. ‘How amazing.’ Clearly the reasons for Tony’s failure to call him about his last column were multiple.

He thought again of his own mother. Already he’d decided to catch the train back into Wellington.

He asked where Tony was this morning and James explained that his father and mother had gone shopping in town with Sue, supplies for the party, decorations.

‘So what about you, Patrick?’ he said. ‘Still at the hospital teaching some poor crippled guy to talk?’

‘Me?’ he said. ‘No, I left there a long time ago.’

‘For real?’ James had leaned across to his son, who was having trouble with his computer game. He struck a few keys and watched the screen for a moment. The game appeared frozen. James stood up and moved his son out of the way, placing him on a chair directly opposite Paddy. ‘You talk to Mr Thompson for a minute. Tell him how you like his country.’

The boy looked at him, then down at his feet in the bowling shoes.

‘Happy birthday, Adam,’ said Paddy.

‘Oh, it’s not his birthday,’ said James.

‘It’s not my birthday,’ said Adam.

‘Okay,’ said Paddy.

James was pressing a button on the hard-drive tower, trying to eject a disk. ‘But life’s good? You look good.’ He glanced at Paddy, making some quick calculation, and then he frowned. ‘I need to get a bike and do something.’ He was getting annoyed with the computer, shaking his head. Paddy saw Jimmy’s body properly now as he leaned forward. Gorzo junior was chunky all over, thickening around the middle. He was a little like Paddy, which may have been the calculation he was doing. Wasn’t he supposed to be a lot younger than this figure from the past, and therefore in better shape? His skin was somewhat sallow. His
hair was thick and black, packed in tight curls mostly towards the top of his head, exposing a large brow. Where was his mother in all of this? Paddy remembered Ellie’s slim neatness. Jimmy had her eyes—light-coloured, almond-shaped—and the same upward curve to the eyebrows. It made them both—mother and son—look slightly quizzical, or as though they were about to deny something,
Who me?
They looked like eyes capable of quick tears. And of course Paddy had seen both these figures crying and crying. Jimmy frustrated, his mother sorrowful.

‘In Sacramento,’ he said, ‘we have lots of tracks. I could go down by the river and follow it along for miles. I see people doing it. I could get one for Sue too and we could bike together. But what about Adam? How would that work?’ He regarded his son with seriousness, momentarily stuck. He was used to solving problems more quickly than this.

‘Get a seat on the back,’ said Paddy. ‘A little kid’s seat.’

‘There you go!’ he said, though he sounded unconvinced. He liked to solve his own problems. He returned to the computer. He’d taken a paper clip and was jiggling it in the jammed disk tray.

It struck Paddy then that James R Gorzo had no interest whatsoever in Paddy’s life and also, more surprisingly, that he’d received no information about Paddy from his father. The Christmas cards, the phone calls, the columns—none of this had touched Jimmy. Paddy was cast forever in the role he’d had when Jimmy was seventeen years old and his world had changed. Paddy belonged there, not here. If he’d produced from the back pocket of his biking jacket the flash cards illustrating a mouth in the act of delivering a diphthong, Jimmy would not have blinked. He would have mimicked the card and asked for another.

And really who was he to Jimmy? Twenty minutes ago Paddy had risen from the chair by the bowling lanes out of the shadows like some ghost and he’d gained little more substance in the time they’d been talking, or rather in the time Jimmy had been talking. Forgetting for a moment the bigger questions—What
had Paddy done since leaving the hospital? How was life for him?—even the smaller questions—Why was he in the cycling gear? Why had he ended up here? What did he want from his father and was there a message?—carried zero appeal for him. Did Paddy have kids?

Here was a curious mix of considerateness—the bowling shoes, the drinks, the time out to spend with him—and disinterest—the cheerful egotism of his stories, the unruffled ignorance about Paddy’s existence. And tempting as it was to draw a line under this and call it the habits of his adopted home, that didn’t seem accurate. He may have had his mother’s eyes but Jimmy appeared to Paddy from this angle not American but quite a bit like his Dad. One could have chosen to be depressed by the thought yet oddly it pleased him. There was something in the continuity of a temperament that was moving to observe. Great and unlikely things had happened to Jimmy after that night he’d fallen out of the quad bike onto the fine sand of a Northland beach and in his life he’d been thrown further than anyone might have imagined—California, Japan, a solar-heated swimming pool, a son who looked different from him. Yet he’d also landed close, it seemed. Here he was. He stood in his father’s office in the Hutt, working unhappily with an improvised tool, swearing softly at an old computer, determined, as Paddy heard him mutter, to fix the fucker.

Adam said to Paddy, ‘You got hairy legs.’

James walked Paddy to the entrance, with Adam insisting on holding his biking shoes. Paddy changed out of the bowling slippers at the doorway. The daylight was intense after the interior dimness. The three of them stood blinking, looking out on the car park where the two older men who’d been bowling were getting into a car driven by the woman from the kitchen, who looked to be in her eighties. They got into the back seat and she pulled out, tooting her horn. James raised a hand in farewell.

‘They’re brothers,’ he said. ‘They come three or four times a week. They live at home and that’s their mother. One of them
can’t really see and the other one can’t really hear but I never remember which. Ron and Harry. Ron was once married, I think. Now they all live back together again. If there are lanes free, Dad lets them play and doesn’t charge them. They pay for drinks. They help out too. Harry was a mechanic, cars, but he can tweak the insides of a bowling machine no problem. And the mother, that’s Annie, does all the club stuff, the tournaments, emailing people, treasurer, whatever. She was here before Dad bought the place. She’s Mrs Bowling. Amazing. You come on a morning like this and you think what a dive and you meet this guy in there who wants a fight and you think where am I? Loserville? But on a club night, this is a community venue, Patrick. It can be pretty fun, pretty serious too. You saw the trophies. There’s blood in those cabinets. There’s history. Here’s what Dad says. He says we’re not the owners of this place, we’re the guardians. That’s all. Guardians. Albeit with a rock solid profit motive!’ Jimmy smiled. He was reaching into his pocket, taking out his wallet. ‘Here I am.’ He handed over his business card.

Paddy read it and put it in his back pouch, apologising for not having his own with him.

‘Second thoughts,’ Jimmy said, ‘I need it back.’ He reached inside Paddy’s pouch and took the card out. Then he produced a very thin pen from a compartment of his wallet and told Adam to turn around. Resting the card on his son’s back he wrote something on it and put it in the pouch. ‘I put the time of Yaya’s birthday. Patrick, we’d be honoured if you could make it but no pressure. It’s going to be right here, at the lanes!’