Somebody Loves Us All (21 page)

‘What’s it called in French, violin?’

‘Violon.’

‘Violon. Close to English, eh.’

‘Your word is from the French, from viele, Old French, then from Provençal, viola. The Italian violino is … how do you say? A smaller type—’

‘Diminutive?’

‘Okay, violino which then becomes violin, the English word.’

‘Interesting. But what are you, a musicologist or something? Music specialist?’

‘No.’

‘You seem to know a lot about it.’

‘I teach.’

‘Music?’

‘Sure.’

The use of this ‘sure’ was vaguely idiomatically wrong. It gave Camille’s manner an offhandedness he wasn’t sure she fully intended. Then again, she did appear rather brusque.

‘Where do you teach?’

‘No, not here, not now.’

Again, what did this mean exactly? Not now because of something that had happened? Or just not at this time?

The band wasn’t quite ready. The drummer was out of his seat, rearranging the position of his cymbals. Lant used his spotted silk to wipe his brow. ‘Very nervous, my friend,’ he said to Camille, who nodded. ‘Do you play as well?’

‘Of course,’ she said.

‘What do you play?’

‘Many things. Piano, flute, I don’t know. Violon.’

‘Ah, the same as my friend. La même chose.’

‘Yes before any concert I am like him.’

‘Really?’

‘Sure. I’m sick a few times. Feeling dizzy, all this.’

‘That will make my friend feel better.’

‘No, because this is normal. This is the pain of the art. From the art? I don’t know how to say this thing.’

‘The pain of the artist?’

She wasn’t convinced. ‘Maybe, yes.’

‘Let’s not call it art before we hear it though.’ He smiled at her.

Camille remained earnest. ‘Amateur is art, I believe. The arts. I think the arts are very important.’

‘Me too.’

‘It doesn’t matter who is doing it.’

‘Right.’

She half turned from the band to look at him. ‘What do you do in your job?’

Camille’s question made him think immediately of Bridget and her advice about fielding this question all those years ago.
Don’t tell people what you do
. He’d never forgotten it. How did one forget what was said over a lifetime? He’d tried to write about this in a few ‘Speech Marks’ columns over the years. What was memorability in speech? Why should we retain some things in great detail that are said to us while forgetting most of it?

There were plenty of theories to do with the mind and memory. But what was this thing called talk and why was it so inefficient? Was it a numbers game? Did we have to listen and listen and listen, or talk and talk and talk, just to produce the material in sufficient bulk to allow our brains to sieve the good stuff? But then clearly we were still in danger of retaining not the good stuff but apparent dross also. It was dross Paddy was drawn to.

He’d asked readers to send in examples from their own lives of things that had been said to them or which they had said, perhaps a number of years ago, which seemed to lack any obvious qualifying features—beauty, wit, poetry, context of speech, valued speaker and so on—but which they nevertheless held firmly in their heads. It was not a line of inquiry that pleased the paper at first. He received over two hundred replies. They were for his research mainly. But kindly, grudgingly, the newspaper printed a few of these.

One woman described how she couldn’t remember her son’s last words with any precision. He’d died of cancer ten years before and she’d been there with him at the moment. He’d been an academic and was lucid and articulate until very near the end but she’d forgotten what he said. Well, she’d been overcome of course. Hardly in a good state to take notes, to gather her
thoughts. But she had an idea he’d been wanting to relay messages for other family members through her and the loss of these was shaming, a matter of regret always. Did he say anything? This was what everyone wanted to know. The answer was yes, but then she drew a blank.

Yet here was the thing. She remembered with utter and pointless accuracy what a neighbour had said to her when she was a child and they were picking lemons together. This neighbour had only lived beside them for a couple of years before moving on and she’d not been close to the woman’s family in any way. On this day she’d come over and asked whether one of the children could help with her lemon tree. That was all. The neighbour wasn’t full of the poetry of lemon picking. She had nothing earthy or strange or memorable to say. But it had stuck for more than sixty years: not only the sound of her voice but her unremarkable talk. You picked the yellowest ones, you left the rotten ones, you didn’t throw them in the bucket, you could make marmalade. The talk now ran in the woman’s head as if she were listening to a bad radio play. She could turn it on, or it would turn itself on, and it was there again. Most weeks she had to hear it. Why? The neighbour had a ginger cat, the woman wrote. And while they worked, the cat watched them. The column Paddy had written had made her wonder, for the first time, whether this connection—lemons, marmalade, a ginger cat—was enough to make her remember forever that day. Lots of people called their ginger cats Marmalade.

Paddy didn’t have an answer to this. But now he remembered in detail the woman’s story. He couldn’t forget it.

Once at intermediate school—the one burned down—a boy he didn’t really know had said Paddy had a fake face. The boy had been sitting along from Paddy at assembly, presumably studying Paddy’s face. His judgement was mysterious but it also chimed with something in Paddy’s twelve-year-old self and perhaps still did though he’d never been able to say exactly how. The boy was a person who never figured again in Paddy’s life, and that school morning was their only contact. Yet he lived
on. A look in the mirror while shaving might readily bring him back. Hello, old fake face.

‘I’m a speech therapist,’ he said to Camille. ‘I work with children who have difficulties.’

She gave one of her French shrugs:
who gives a shit
. He was beginning to like Camille. Her clothes were almost dowdy: a long, shapeless greenish dress, without a belt, sleeves that puffed out girlishly, sandals. Her skin was colourless, as if she spent all day inside. Her hair was pulled back in a harsh knot.

The band started playing. It was the first time Paddy had heard them. Once or twice Lant had invited them to the gigs at the last minute, his way of ensuring they could never make it. Or, as in the case here, he’d become vague about the details: were they even playing? He wasn’t so sure.

They sounded all right, pleasantly folky, competent and well-rehearsed. Lant’s violin ran under the music sparingly, tastefully. It was hard to know what the fuss was about with his nerves—but Camille had said she would have been the same. The guitarist sang and Lant and the bassist provided very passable harmonies. Paddy had never known Lant could sing. His face changed when he sang, it grew appealingly earnest. The first song got loud applause. Two parents started dancing carefully with each other in a kind of waltz as the second song started. Some of the kids whistled at the dancing couple and then stopped. It was a mild evening, windless and with a dusky light softening the sharp outlines of the school’s silvery roofs. A few more couples joined in the dancing. Helena was suddenly beside Paddy. She smiled at him and kissed him on the cheek. She put her bag down and they held hands, watching Lant’s band and the dancing parents. He felt a tremendous warmth spread through him. Camille had been pulled away by her son towards the food.

Paddy glanced behind and saw that in the shadow of the school’s only tree, one of the boys who’d been circling the netball pole was now making figure eights through the hopscotch markings. He rode the same path each time, waving the bike through its route with the smallest movements of his body
weight. There was something dreamy about the scene. He was in his own world. Boys led demented solitary lives. We turned and turned and made our paths on the concrete playground under the tree at dusk while our parents danced and forgot us. Every father, every man who is not a father, would recognise himself in that boy. There’s no one else around, no one watching except me. And yet he’d connected himself to the rest of the evening by finding in his movements the rhythm of the music. He was cycling to Lant’s band, weaving in and out, making the shape of his eight, moving to the lines of the bass, turning on each special guitar strum, as if they’d worked it all out beforehand, boy and bike and band.

It might have been a film Paddy was watching, complete with soundtrack. Did the thought arrive before or after he saw Dora and Medbh? They were standing by a classroom door, behind the tree. Medbh was pointing a small digital camera while Dora talked into her ear, directing. They were filming the boy on his bike. It annoyed Paddy a little. The boy hadn’t given his permission. Paddy thought of Iyob at Helena’s language school.

He looked back at the band, intent on regaining that pleasure. Lant was handling a nice little solo. While he played he looked different somehow. The position of the chin, his concentration, his slightly pursed lips, gave his face this serious solitary aspect Paddy had never seen before. It was not that he was simply hoping to get through it without a mistake. He was better than that. The other band members had stepped away to let everyone see Lant and his instrument. He quickened the attack with his bow, playing faster runs with equal smoothness. The drummer and the bass player were grinning at each other. Paddy and Helena and everyone watching understood this moment to have become successful in ways the musicians themselves had perhaps not anticipated. It was a concert in a school playground but it was also something else. Was this what Camille had meant by the arts? The pain of art. Lant played on, utterly absorbed. Here was the reason he’d been so ambivalent and cagey about them attending the band’s performances. It wasn’t that he was
worried about any sloppiness or them not enjoying the thing or the chance of seeing him make a fool of himself, at least not in the way that might be imagined. Music required of Lant absolute commitment. Nothing was held back. There wasn’t a trace of irony. There wasn’t any space for his usual battery of tricks and deflections. He was afraid of Paddy seeing him like this. He was lost to himself in a moment of devotion as powerful and unthinking as the boy riding figure eights behind them. As he played he couldn’t account for himself.

Beside Paddy, Helena squeezed his hand and they exchanged a look of delighted surprise, which meant exactly this: who is that on stage?

When he was thirty-eight, Paddy’s father had surgery to remove varicose veins. Shortly after this, he bought a second-hand bicycle from a work colleague. These two facts must have been related though at the time Paddy wasn’t interested in putting them together. Paddy was eight or nine years old. The veins were not something he remembered thinking about though he did have an image of his father peeling off a tight sock-like bandage from his leg while sitting on the edge of the bath. The bandage was pale pink, skin-coloured he supposed. Paddy’s mother had to wash these special vein socks and they’d be hung on the washing line. This disgusted Margie, who would later develop the same problem in her legs.

Paddy however was interested in the bike, which had originally come from London. The work colleague had been English. The bike looked a little like a Raleigh Twenty, with smallish wheels and an angled frame, except that it had a clip on its central shaft that allowed the bike to be undone and carried in two parts. At the time, no one had seen anything like this. When later Paddy went to England and Europe, he saw these bikes everywhere though he never saw them taken apart.

His father now began riding to the Lower Hutt train station and taking the bike to work. On the platform, he’d unclip the
bike and tuck both parts under his arm. Probably there was no need for him to do this since there was a special compartment at the back of the train for bikes. He could have stored his there. When Paddy had caught the train back from Gorzo’s bowling lanes, he’d thought about all this. But Brendan stepped into the carriage with his bike under his arm. He did it, according to Paddy’s mother, because he was a show-off. Much later, when Paddy considered his father in these years, he didn’t disagree with this and yet he also thought there was something else. His father had wanted to meet people, yet he needed a prop. He was basically a shy man. His parents shared this. His mother didn’t need people but his father did. Or rather his mother needed his father to meet people for her, she relied on that. Her shyness was the blunt variety, the sort that worked upon over time came to look like self-reliance, or was self-reliance. Whoever visited their house, unless it was family, came as the guest of Brendan first. These were the people she called ‘your father’s friends’.

He’d always unclip the bike while waiting on the platform at both Lower Hutt and Wellington, for the return journey. He made sure that as many people as possible witnessed the bike becoming two pieces. Without seeing it for oneself it was difficult to grasp the oddness and unnaturalness of this parting, wheel from wheel, front from back. In time there were bikes that folded through a hinge and of course people regularly transported bikes by taking off the front wheel, but his father’s bike, with its complete bisection, remained in his mind as a one-off. He’d seen it done many times of course and it still made an impression. No wonder people came up and talked to his father. They asked where he got it and was it available in New Zealand and had it ever come undone while he was riding it. No, the clip was secure.

He worked in the Records Office of the Wellington City Council, about a ten-minute bike ride from the station. At work, apparently he unclipped the bike and stored it in a cupboard. He’d completed a library diploma and was in charge of the housing section dealing with requests from homeowners who wanted
to learn about their houses or who needed original plans for renovation work. It was where he’d first met Teresa. She’d brought in her elderly father, who was interested in getting a copy of the original drawings of their old Miramar house. He wanted to frame the best drawing and hang it on the wall of the Naenae house. The story was Teresa had booked, or almost booked—the story wasn’t definitive—her passage to Rhodesia, where she planned to live with Pip, her cousin. Brendan prevented her escape.