Somebody Loves Us All (22 page)

Paddy didn’t imagine his father ever went for recreational rides in his lunch-hour—was this ever done back then? The bike was solely to get from A to B, and of course to provoke the sort of casual contact with strangers his father enjoyed.

At his father’s funeral, when they were having cakes and drinks in the church hall, his mother was approached by a man she didn’t know. Paddy was standing nearby, behind his mother and with his two sisters in a tight group, a huddle. They were all trying to hide. Their family group of four occupied the smallest space possible. They’d spent almost an hour in the room, though it felt like days, trying to find the best place to be, or not to be. Having tried to disappear into a corner, where it turned out they became highly visible and caged, they’d moved to an awkward space in the narrow gap between the two food tables. They fingered the edges of the white tablecloths and longed to lie under the tables, hidden from view.

The man said he was very sorry to hear about Paddy’s father and he hoped she didn’t mind that he’d come to the church but he’d got to know Brendan a little over the past few years as a fellow commuter.

Paddy wasn’t sure whether his mother really understood what he meant. She wasn’t capable of much more than a poor imitation of nodding on that day, or for a long time afterwards. It was ghastly to see it. Her head seemed barely stuck on. It was not an exaggeration to say they thought it might simply fall off. His sisters had the same feeling about this because he talked to them about it years later. ‘Like a wooden head at a fair, a clown’s head that you toss balls into,’ said Margie.

Their mother may have believed she was nodding properly but she lacked the control and her head wavered around on an elastic neck. She gave the man the same unfocused wandering nod and tried to smile and move him on; her hand fluttered briefly as if waving at an insect. The man had never met Teresa before and may have thought this was more or less how she always appeared. He certainly missed her hand gesture. Or he may simply have felt the pressing need to say what he’d come to say regardless of the reception he was getting. He told her that Brendan had been known to everyone on the 8.13 into town and the 5.43 back. These numbers seemed to Paddy incomprehensible. He thought they were connected with money. There had been a lot of talk over the preceding days of money, of mortgages and interest rates. His mother’s beloved older brother, Graham, was a lawyer. More or less, he moved into the house at that time, then he died too, delivering what Paddy came to see as an almost fatal blow to her. He thought that for many years Teresa was scarcely alive though for their sakes she did a sometimes-frenetic impersonation of a living being. She went back to work as a typist. She drove them around to their sports games on weekends. She talked to their friends. It wasn’t until they’d all left home that Paddy thought she began to recover, if that was the word.

During this period, among the children, the threat was often made that one day, without warning, they’d be off to live in Africa. Margie was especially good at tormenting her sister with this. Pip, the mythical cousin, had come back for the funeral and was seen in private conversation with their mother—conversations that stopped the moment anyone came near. Apart from Graham, Pip seemed to be the only person Teresa could cope with. They overheard a fluency in their mother’s voice, laughter even. What could she be laughing about except some crazy scheme to leave all this misery behind? Yes, their futures were being plotted, and more or less, they’d wake up one morning in Africa, every aspect of their lives changed.

Pip had given each of them books connected with Africa as presents, which they refused to open.

Paddy saw his mother blink and try to remain fixed on the man, their father’s commuter friend, who continued to talk. Finally the man seemed to have finished. There was a pause and he looked around, searching for some excuse to leave her. He didn’t know anyone else of course and he seemed stuck. Teresa was incapable of making any of the usual noises of goodbye. She’d spent all this time hardly saying a word to anyone despite the fact that she’d been approached by almost everyone at the reception. They were two adults, marooned. He turned back and said, ‘So what will happen to the bike now?’

‘Happen?’ said his mother, shocked.

‘Where will it go? Who will get it?’

‘Who? Him.’ She pointed at Paddy with a sort of violence. ‘He’ll get it.’

Nothing previously had been said about his father’s bike. Paddy was certain his mother had been panicked into making this declaration. Perhaps she thought the man himself wanted it, or thought that he was entitled in some way to it as a keepsake of all the good times he’d had with their father on the trains between Lower Hutt and Wellington.

The man looked at Paddy approvingly. ‘Good,’ he said. Then he shook Paddy’s hand with great firmness and moved off through the crowd.

As it turned out, Paddy found the bike very awkward to ride. He wasn’t that much shorter than his father yet the distance between the seat and the handlebars was a little too great, forcing him to sit forward on an uncomfortable angle or to pedal while standing and use the seat only when coasting. It also had just three gears and its small wheels made it a tiring bike to ride up even low hills. There was something else. Boys at school liked taking it apart, which was a pain. But they also paid attention to it in a slightly mocking way. They were not like the adult commuters on his father’s train. They regarded the bike as freakish and strange and something to be attacked.
It was impossible to lock securely since there was no way of threading a chain through the clip. Often Paddy would discover the front half only of the bike still locked to the bike rack; the other half would be hidden around the school—in a classroom cupboard, in a bush, or once, hanging in a tree down by the stopbank of the Hutt River.

Paddy used the bike for a few months, and then he put it away in their garage. His mother made no fuss at all when she found out. She confessed later that she hated the bike because she’d never trusted the clip to stay in place and had imagined a horrible accident happening to anyone riding it at the time it came apart. When he heard this, Paddy was surprised. Firstly, his mother was mechanically minded and must have known the clip wasn’t dangerous; if it had been, she would have done something about it. Secondly, this was exactly what everyone thought, a conventional idea. It was the sort of thing strangers said to his father at the train station. Paddy had previously considered his mother as different in some uplifting fashion, secretly intelligent, utterly penetrating. A typist but also quite brilliant. But she could be this too, he thought, and not entirely unhappily, she could be quite average, nearly normal.

After Lant’s band had finished, they went to speak to him. He was in high spirits, waving the red silk cloth he’d used under his chin, comically fanning himself. ‘Phew,’ he said. ‘We survived, I think. No rotten fruit thrown. A few walkouts but what can you do?’

He was back. The old Lant. For a moment this felt disappointing, as if Paddy had hoped it would have been possible for his friend to maintain that other intensity. Yet there was something a little sheepish too about him. Helena shook his upper arm and told him how much she’d enjoyed the music and how wonderfully well he’d played. For perhaps the first time, Paddy thought, she appeared genuinely taken by something in his friend. Lant waved this away, said some things about the
sound, that the bass was too loud in his ear. The rest of the band was actually deaf, he told them, which presented problems. But this all seemed a bit half-hearted and obviously throwaway. He was aware something had happened and that they’d seen it, which was pleasing, worrying also. They’d uncovered a part of him and that was moving to him—Paddy saw this; it was also causing Lant a sneaking regret. He’d been outed, it seemed. Where to from here?

Unusually for Lant, he now appeared speechless. He looked back at them, grinning and shaking his head. He held his violin up and pointlessly inspected it. As a kind of tribute to him, and in friendly contest, they too remained silent. Helena and Paddy were both extremely happy to observe this new Lant trying to fend off their appreciation and understanding. Fortunately for him, a couple of his band-mates called him over and he left them, holding his bow up in farewell.

Paddy turned around and found himself in the line of Medbh’s camera. Dora was with her.

‘Carry on as if we weren’t here,’ said Dora, coming forward and kissing her mother quickly on the cheek. With Paddy, she shook hands, which was their comic routine. The first time he’d met her, he’d shaken her hand, which she’d apparently found odd. She also liked to call him Thompson. Usually they met in the style of business associates or old boys from an English public school. He often said, ‘Pleased to see you again, Price.’ It was a failing sort of levity. They always ran out of it fast and lapsed back into mutual incomprehension.

He’d tried hard at the beginning to earn, if not her friendship, then at least some sort of respect. The truth was he couldn’t understand how Helena had ended up with this person for a daughter. Paddy credited the father. Dora seemed to be waiting for Paddy to be gone from their lives, much as he was waiting for the exit of Paul Shawn. In asserting her rights as Helena’s daughter, she always gave him a clear image of his temporariness. That was how it felt. She was the institution; Paddy was the interloper.

‘Where’s your permit to film?’ he said.

‘You don’t even have a child at this school,’ said Dora.

She’d meant this lightly perhaps but Dora could never quite do lightness. There was always a creeping hostility. The spell of the music had vanished. Lant was packing away his violin in his case and Paddy saw Camille leaving the school grounds, holding her son’s hand. She glanced back in his direction just before she disappeared around the corner of the building, as if she realised she was leaving without completing their conversation. The French were big on greetings and farewells so maybe she was only thinking of observing the forms. Whatever, Paddy was annoyed he’d not had the chance to talk to her further. Somehow the presence of a real French person, even one as un-chic and unsympathetic as Camille, created an indefinable hopefulness. Anyway, maybe most French people or at least quite a few were a lot like Camille. He’d never been to France. The closest he’d come, apart from England, was Northern Italy in his early twenties, just after he’d finished university. Indeed, he’d waited five hours for a train at San Remo to go for a day-trip to the Côte d’Azur. First the train was late, then very late, and then no, he wasn’t going to France.

He decided he would try to get Camille’s phone number, perhaps through the school.

Dora and Helena were talking a few feet away. Next to him, Medbh was reviewing something on the camera. ‘The silence project?’ he said.

‘We’re calling it
The Silent Treatment
,’ she said.

‘Nice. It’s a doco then?’

‘We’re not sure.’

‘You don’t like labels.’

‘Except for funding applications.’

‘You got the boy on his bike.’

‘Quite good shadows.’ She passed him the camera and on the little screen he watched the boy go round and round under the tree, head down, asleep at the wheel. It was black and white. There was no sound but the boy made a rhythm anyway, just as
he’d thought when he’d seen him. It made Paddy think at once of the footage they’d taken of him when he was being assessed at the bike shop. Black and white. The gulf between the automatic movements, the sensuality and completeness of the boy, and his own uncoordinated adult striving was immense, laughably so. Yet he’d been the boy. Paddy thought of saying something about this but he stopped himself. Too maudlin, too much about the passage of time. These filmmakers considered Sam Covenay a hero of sorts. Had it been Medbh’s project alone, he might have spoken. Dora’s involvement was a turn-off. He gave Medbh back the camera. What had also come to mind on this theme was his cartoon portrait—still unreturned. In the confusion of Geoff Harley’s entrance with his mother the day before, there wasn’t a chance for Angela Covenay to fetch the defaced updated version from her car.

‘I heard about your mother,’ said Medbh.

‘You were the first to hear it,’ he said.

‘I should have realised something was wrong.’

‘You told me and I did nothing.’

‘Because I’d never met her before.’ Medbh seemed on the point of getting quite upset. He was also aware that Dora had become interested in their conversation though she was still talking to Helena.

He lowered his voice. ‘No one blames you, Medbh. I just didn’t take it in properly at the time.’

‘I was an idiot.’

‘I was the idiot, believe me. But in the end, there was nothing anyone could have done. It had happened.’

‘Is that true, Patrick?’

‘She woke up in French.’

‘Will she be all right?’

Helena and Dora had now moved back to join them. ‘Is she in the hospital?’ said Dora.

He told them that Teresa was back in her apartment, resting.

‘By herself?’ said Dora accusingly.

‘We have our phones,’ said Helena. ‘One of the doctor’s pieces of advice was we should treat things as normal. Keep it as normal as possible.’

‘I don’t want to cast aspersions on the medical knowledge of our fair city but have they treated this before?’ said Dora. ‘Do they get a lot of people turning up speaking in different accents? Is there an accent and emergency ward?’

This was another thing that rankled, he thought. She could actually be clever, she had something.

Medbh stifled a laugh. ‘Shut up, Dor,’ she said.

‘But seriously,’ said Dora. ‘Seriously Medbh, have you heard of this before? No? Have you?’ She was looking at Paddy.

‘Sure,’ he said. He tried to shrug.

‘Really?’ She turned to her mother. ‘I’m really sorry for his mother but treat it as normally as possible? If I started speaking with a full-on French accent, can you please do something for me? Could I just get that established as a basic principle? Dora turns French, do something. Okay?’