Somebody Loves Us All (25 page)

It was an outrageous lie.

‘Okay,’ said Paddy, ‘now the mind games begin.’

Lant shook his head. He had something else he wanted to say, he said. In the ballpark of France. Before he could be stopped, he was into it. ‘When Melinda and I went to Paris, before Crystal was born, she was in a clothes store, in the changing rooms, and they had a sign which said, “Please keep your panties with you at all times.” And that became our sort of catch-cry the whole trip. It was a very sexed-up sojourn, I remember. Of course now if I said that to her, remember when you saw that sign, “Please keep
your panties with you at all times”, she’d not find it acceptable at all. It’d be inappropriate, crude. I’m no longer allowed to talk about her panties, the mother of my child.’

‘Is there a problem?’ said Paddy. ‘You’re divorced and she hates your guts.’

‘Thank you for that. But you’re right. Yet I’m thinking, what am I thinking? Intimacy is very fragile. And life is—’

‘What?’

‘Oh, I don’t know. Look at poor old Helen Clark. You define an era and then what? Booted into oblivion.’

The change in topic was highly irritating.

‘Poor Helen,’ continued Lant. ‘Such intelligence and strength of character, rewarded how?’

‘The writing was on the wall.’

Lant sighed. ‘Truth is, Card, I felt sort of sick of Labour too, you know. I mean it’s sad. But finally not so sad perhaps.’

Paddy studied the speaker. ‘You voted for National, didn’t you?’

‘Come on.’

‘Jesus. I don’t believe it. You voted for National.’

‘Well, I’m not proud of myself.’

Lant had sent out invitations for an election night get-together. Paddy and Helena were going. Then a couple of days before, Lant cancelled. Something had come up, he explained, taking him out of town. Here’s what had come up. He’d suddenly thought, I’m betraying my ideals and an audience was usually not desirable for apostasy. Paddy said as much now.

‘Punish me, Saint Patrick,’ said Lant, ‘I deserve it.’

‘You’ve voted into power a man with a speech defect.’

‘There’s no defect. What are you talking about defect? You of all people. As you’ve said yourself more than once, there’s only speech. And anyway, Churchill had a speech defect.’

Yes, they’d had that conversation.

They finished their final drinks in silence.

‘I’ve lost her,’ said Paddy. Immediately he despised himself for cracking, for the grandiosity.

Lant was way behind. Perhaps still on the former PM. ‘Lost who?’

‘What if, I mean. What if I’ve lost my mother?’

Lant leaned forward. ‘She’s not doing anything on purpose, you know.’

This made Paddy stand up. He was furious.

Outside it was still mostly night though the sky was lightening close to the hills above Ngaio, where Stephanie and her kids were hopefully asleep. The cool was vaguely beneficial. Paddy felt his body start to work. There wasn’t a sign of stiffness or pain from the bike ride or perhaps that was safely masked now by the effects of the alcohol. The streets weren’t empty. People with recent histories similar to their own wandered along, trying doors, making sudden movements as if to avoid objects only they could see. Paddy and Lant made way for a group of young women taking up the whole footpath, swaying and tripping. The women called out something in their direction, and then Lant chased after them. He came back with a cigarette.

The men kept a steady and superior course, bumping harmlessly into each other as they walked. Lant’s boots made a different sound, a sign that he was moving his feet in some new way. They hit the ground with an odd flappy noise as if the soles had come loose from the uppers. Paddy realised this was drawing attention to them. A few people across the street had stopped to watch. Then Paddy was aware of footsteps coming from behind them and a raised voice. Someone’s after us, he thought. This was what the people were watching, some interesting disturbance safely removed from them. ‘Who is it?’ said Lant. His head was hanging down, the cigarette stuck on his lip. They were both quickening their steps.

‘Keep moving,’ said Paddy.

The voice was closer now. ‘Hey! Hey!’

They were travelling as fast as they could without breaking into a run. But why not run? Because they thought they could escape this without showing that they were even aware of it.
Paddy’s mind went back to other pursuits where Lant was involved. They’d run from parties before, jumped fences in Naenae holding LPs they’d tried to put on—
Never Mind the Bollocks
in a very brown disco house where they knew no one—and another time from some cops who’d happened upon them urinating in an alley probably not far from this same spot. The good old days.

‘Stop! You guys!’

Lant was breathing heavily beside him. He took the cigarette out and spat something from his mouth.

‘Hey!’

‘Wait on,’ said Paddy.

‘Jesus,’ said Lant.

‘Wait a moment, Lant.’ Paddy took his arm and made him stop suddenly. They almost fell together.

‘Guys!’ The voice was with them.

They turned.

‘You forgot this.’

It was the barman. He held out Lant’s violin case. Lant reached for it rather blindly, almost doubled over. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Very kind of you.’

‘All right?’

‘We’ve had a wonderful evening, thanks.’

Three men, breathing heavily.

‘Who’d you think I was?’

‘No one,’ said Lant. ‘We just have very guilty consciences.’ Somewhere he’d lost his cigarette. He looked for it for a while, muttering to himself, and then gave up.

Another group went past. The girls didn’t look older than sixteen. One of them was saying, ‘Just the idea of him with someone else makes my skin crawl.’

Lant said to Paddy, ‘First you feel flattered to hear something like that because you think they’ve sort of trusted you with it. Then you realise you only heard it because you were invisible to them. They speak because they don’t see you. Girls don’t see us any more.’

Paddy said, ‘Please tell me that you’ve not just thought of that now.’

‘Knowing it, even for years and years, doesn’t prevent it from being a recurring pain.’ He took a few more paces. ‘I’m struggling with the fact that my normal partner is now a woman of almost my age.’

The almost was good. It was a joke. But Paddy didn’t want jokes. He said he didn’t feel that way at all about women. And as he spoke, he believed it. Did Lant believe him? Probably not. Fuck Lant.

But Lant stopped for a moment. He looked at Paddy. ‘I respect that,’ he said. He appeared to be sincere.

They walked on towards the corner of Dixon Street and Cuba Mall, where they were to part company. Lant lived in the top storey of a house he owned in McDonald Crescent, a few minutes away. He rented out the bottom of the house to a physiotherapy clinic and received free sessions in return for letting them use the space in front of his garage for client parking. The physio, he said, was what got him through the first months of cycling. He was speaking about it now. Paddy knew all of this and didn’t want to hear it again. He also said the physio was good for post-violin playing since he often got a sore neck, which shouldn’t happen but his technique was rusty. He’d have to see them tomorrow if he could. Was Paddy still sore from the ride to Lower Hutt? No, Paddy told him. He said he couldn’t believe Paddy had gone out there solo first time. What did it feel like honestly? Good, said Paddy. They were walking more slowly than before and Paddy had the sense that Lant wanted to delay their arrival at the corner. He’d moved into the sentimental phase of the evening and Paddy, longing for his bed and feeling hostile towards his friend, was not with him.

But why hate Lant? For fucking with his mind about his mother? Because of the National Party? The violin incident and the chasing barman was nothing, a laugh. Paddy thought again of the time when Lant had lied to the Catholic junior doctors about his work, fooling everyone with his emotional
speech. Could it be that he resented him for that still? But Paddy admired him for it too, sort of. Maybe his disenchantment had a plainer source: the coloured alcohol he’d poured into his system. Paddy wasn’t used to it and it had poisoned him. Toxic was a good word for his state.

Lant stopped for a moment, moving the violin case from one hand to the other. ‘Whenever I’m feeling lonely or a bit depressed,’ he said, ‘I go downstairs and sit in their waiting room until an appointment comes free.’ They were back on the physio stuff.

‘Sounds good.’

‘Then you feel the hands on your body, and that helps.’

‘Yep.’

‘Not sexually. I mean, Bruce is like this short, ex-hockey rep guy.’

‘You don’t fancy him.’

‘No, and Rae, his wife, she’s …’

‘Not your type.’

He stopped again in the street and turned to face Paddy, fully exasperated. ‘It isn’t about that, Patrick! Can you be serious for a moment? Listen, it’s about human contact.’

‘I understand. It’s about physios in the basement.’

‘Oh, you’re a cunt.’

‘I know I am.’

Lant regarded Paddy with hostile disappointment and Paddy saw that he’d succeeded in giving him a portion of his own temper. Paddy walked on. At the corner, as a precaution against any sudden embrace, Paddy made sure he kept a few feet away from him as they said goodbye. There seemed little danger now, Lant was stewing. Paddy could do nothing about his own mood and he felt sorry about it standing with Lant early in the morning but that made it worse. Anyway, neither of us will remember these details tomorrow, he thought. They nodded at each other and turned away.

‘Au revoir!’ Lant called out as Paddy walked off. Was it spite or solidarity? Paddy couldn’t tell.

The Mall was deserted except for two buskers standing in the doorway of a shop playing acoustic guitars. They looked like students and they were singing, of course, ‘American Pie’. They’d opened a guitar case to collect the money. Paddy didn’t want to get too close to them so he was unable to see whether there was any money in the case. There was no one else around. Staggeringly pointless. He thought at once of the two Catholic junior doctors years ago. It was a song he’d always hated, the song of bores who saw in the interminable lyrics special meanings, deep symbolism. The buskers sang with the sort of pretentious emotionalism, the whiny pleading that this song always drew from its converts. Maybe they were med students. They threw their heads back as they sang, giving each other little looks of encouragement. They weren’t real buskers, they only did this after they’d had a few drinks and on deserted streets, hoping to be seen by one or two people so they could claim it as a great night. They must have been aware of Paddy though they showed no sign of it. He counted as an audience, as part of their ‘great night’, which made him resent them viciously. What he hated most was the idea that this pair was actually Lant and himself. Hadn’t they too entertained the same idea—to sing on the streets at night? He was sure of it, and sure they hadn’t done it. Even more strongly now he felt the desire for his bed and to be close to Helena’s sleeping body. He wondered again about his mother and a useless alcoholic irritation gripped him. Perhaps it was in his power, in his range, to therapise her, just as the fuckwit Paul Shawn had said.

The city had grown unlikeable or Paddy was unlikeable in the city—one of the two. He was moving quickly, wishing for a sort of invisibility, keeping his head down. He was Sam Covenay, he was.

He thought in a rush of sentences. You need to see life as a story with meaning. But you impose this meaning on the world. Thus spake Susan Neiman in
Moral Clarity
, recently in from Amazon. This need was crucial to human dignity, ‘without which we hold our lives to be worthless’. He’d written out the
stickie earlier that day. Cf FAS? he wrote. Could his mother hold firm to her dignity? What was her story now? Contingency came a-knocking one morning on her new apartment door, where Paddy had placed her. Teresa opened the door and said, ‘How do you do?’ He thought in one moment, she’ll be all right, and in another, but what will all right look like?

Ahead of him a man stepped out of an entranceway carrying a stack of long cardboard boxes. He was adding these to an existing pile on the footpath. A yeasty blast of air came from inside. It was a bakery. The man was wearing a paper hat and an apron. He was re-entering the place as Paddy passed and he gave Paddy a quick look and then glanced at the boxes on the footpath. He seemed to be sizing up whether or not Paddy presented a threat to the boxes. They must have contained something—bread or pastries—which were to be delivered to cafés for the day’s trade. He’d decided Paddy was harmless because he closed the door.

A part of Paddy wanted to repay the man’s scrutiny by scooping up one of the boxes. Not that he was hungry at all. Paddy looked in through the window and saw him moving behind a counter into a back room, which was well lit. Just as Paddy was about to move off, another figure appeared near the counter, also wearing a hat and apron. He first thought it was a boy. The figure bent down then moved back into the lit space and he saw that it was a woman. She opened an oven and slid a large tray out before disappearing from view for a moment and when he saw her again, she was carrying another tray that she put in the oven, closing the door. At this point she took off her hat and ran her fingers through her hair, itching her scalp. She looked straight out at the street, past the counter to the window where he was standing. It was Camille, the French mother from school.

Mon Dieu a French baker!

He wasn’t sure whether she’d seen him. Maybe the light on inside hid him because she showed no sign of being watched. He moved his head slightly and she peered in his direction, trying
to work things out. She stepped a few feet into the bakery, into the shadow, still looking towards him. Could she recognise him from where she was, or would she think he was just some strange man cruising the streets, pressing his face against shop windows, hoping to spook people? She turned her head slightly and said something to the man Paddy had seen with the boxes. From outside he couldn’t hear anything. The man appeared by the counter. There was still time to walk off before he was recognised.