Somebody Loves Us All (3 page)

She thought about languages. She had learned shorthand, if that counted as a language. The name alone gave it away, as though the writer’s tool had become a claw. Men spoke and as fast as it came out of their mouths, you stitched it to the page. Pip, she remembered, had wanted to be taught a few words; she was training to be a dental nurse and hoped to write rude things about the dentists who bullied her, who rubbed against her as they looked inside mouths. ‘See here,’ they said. She wanted to write such things in their presence, smiling and looking meek in the Pip way.

Pip’s return to New Zealand had made Teresa think a lot about things she’d hardly considered for decades. Moving house too. Moving moved things, she thought.

Of course some people thought shorthand was magic, like spells inscribed on ancient tombs, secret code, but not the other girls from the pool. Shorthand was blindingly tedious, though you could use it to communicate to each other about boyfriends,
pass notes under their noses. Pip’s instinct was right. It was the language of disenchantment, of hopes up in smoke, which was a phrase that came back to her.

Come, come, come. You’ll love it here. Oh yes? The mooching pupae, Teresa wrote back, things biting you in the night.

And who, Pip replied, is biting you in the night?

They were both virgins.

Teresa brought her tea into the bedroom and sat on the edge of her bed to drink it. Somehow this was better than being in the kitchen. There was a sort of intimidation still in the newness of the surroundings, in the wonder of it. Me? I live here?

In the alleyway between their building and the one beside it there were occasionally young men and sometimes a young woman, perhaps a prostitute, involved in some transaction though it wasn’t a furtive thing. If Teresa happened to walk past, they didn’t move off or attempt to conceal anything; they turned and stared at her, but not with hostility. They said, you? Are you also involved?

She tried to concentrate on the weekend ahead. Stephanie would pick her up that evening and they’d drive over the terrible hill, the three girls in the back, strapped into their car seats. Three dolls in a row. They always had fun. At the top of the hill Teresa would take over the driving while Steph held out bags for the girls to be sick in, and even this had a kind of merriment to it. Isabelle would want to hold her own bag. I’ve done more in mine, Mummy. And coming down the other side, there were the plains, which always made her think of the first explorers, the sunny knobbed expanse beyond the dark tangle of foothills. You breathed out seeing that, and felt pioneering, while also grateful the hard work had been done, the vineyards and cafés in place.

She packed a few things for the weekend. It was probably strange to be going away so soon after moving in—Paddy had wondered about the wisdom—but Teresa couldn’t disappoint Steph. Of course Paddy wondered about the wisdom of that too. Make sure you get some time for yourself, he told her. Yet
she truly didn’t mind, did not experience it as anything but natural, the maintaining or supporting or doing something with the buoyancy of her youngest daughter, who was excitable and radiant, and who therefore required some solid backing. Teresa was solid. Not to herself of course but she was aware of an effect and part of that was reliability. Yes she would be there when she said she would, and surprisingly some people never managed even this simple thing. And she didn’t mind it at all, the running around, the ferrying, the caring, though not many believed her. But she was also her daughter’s audience and found that sustaining, interesting on a daily basis, as she did all her children’s lives, even Margie, who’d always struggled with her younger sister’s position, actually with any arrangement concerning the family. It was why she lived in Canada.

Darling Pip, I’m thinking of coming, I am. You know I won’t and can’t and how could I but I’m thinking of it, thinking of you under the mosquito net, among the grasshoppers, among the pink giraffes. Pip had been served first in a shop, despite the queue in front of her. Blacks. The thing is, Pip wrote, you can’t not be served first. The blacks don’t like it if you try.

Sometimes Stephanie entered the house calling out that she was there, expecting nothing less than immediate attention, and it was as if she’d come home from school for lunch and her daughters were kids she’d befriended on the way. Look who I found. She seemed very distant from them. Stephanie was a great mother and sometimes she desired, understandably, to be free of that, even to be not very good, helpless, lost. Teresa would discover her at the open door of the fridge. ‘I’m totally starving! We all are!’ Her voice itself not just the echo but the actual voice of the girl she’d been.

That was the old house. Now you had to buzz people in. They stood in the street, looking up.

After washing her breakfast things, Teresa had left the apartment building by the stairs; she was still not quite used to the lift. The alley was deserted. The shops weren’t open yet and she walked in a large pointless circle, around the waterfront
and back to Courtenay Place, taking in almost nothing. There was a small man in a yellow woollen hat juggling tennis balls, grinning at her. Had he been left over from the night before? Yet he wasn’t drunk because he was keeping four balls, or even five, in the air. She didn’t want to pause and count. She turned away from him as she passed and became aware that he was following her. He was bouncing a ball in time with her steps. After a few paces he stopped. In her head ran the same few words. Vendredi. Novembre. Mercredi. The thermometer’s mercury again, the sounds of each word seeming silvery, globular, liquid, as they slid backwards into each other in a sort of song that was tiring, catchy, impossible to get rid of.

Leaving Moore Wilson’s with the supplies, she felt her teeth become strange, heavy, partly locked, her tongue caught behind them, its tip pressed hard against the roof of her mouth. Her jaw was suddenly tight. She didn’t seem to be willing any of this. A kind of paralysis, she thought. Stroke. I’m having a stroke. Why hadn’t she thought of that before?

That the idea failed to bring her to her knees gave her a strengthening boost of pride; even if she were dying, there was a decent streak of realism in her. My speech has been affected in the direction of the Romance languages. And still she was able to swing her arms, carry her shopping, walk along this Wellington street. She didn’t have the nice bag with its elegant scrollwork, the surprising teeshirt, the fixed wavy hair—there were no fontaines or montagnes—but she had still become this, a slightly French woman on her way home.

She moved through the covered car park with her bags, a little fearful, but determined. A van had to stop for her though she was only aware of it after she’d crossed in front of it. That woke her up to the world. The dread of collapsing in public did it. She’d seen these women, lying on crowded footpaths, their sweaty heads propped up on someone’s balled-up jacket, semi-conscious, apologising; the deathless instinct to cover one’s
knees. Let me go in my own place, she prayed. She was carrying the world’s most expensive sausages, chocolate bread.

People passed her, going to work. Gusts of wind struck at her in contradictory ways, wrapping the plastic shopping bags against her legs, and then releasing her, giving her a shove. Off you go. Her step was steady and fierce. She realised she was going past Helena’s work and she kept her head down. She didn’t want to meet the kind Helena now. Helena was a busy lady too. Such a meeting might easily knock Teresa off her feet completely. The temptation would be to fall weeping and close-mouthed into those arms. Unfair unfair.

She glanced up at the sign: Capital Language School. The irony stabbed at her, pin-like in the tops of her arms, a joke injection. Languages. A Japanese girl waited on the steps, cuddling her backpack to her chest, her smile fixed in terror and uncertainty. Perhaps it was her first day and she’d just stepped off the plane. The girl’s eyes widened as they met Teresa’s. Don’t ask me a question, Teresa thought, ducking off. Where is art gallery? Look at weeping willow.
Reaping rillow
.

She walked on for a moment, thinking of the people she hoped not to run into.

Then Teresa turned back to see whether the Japanese girl on the steps of the school needed her help but she was gone and under this blow Teresa bent lower in her limbs. How heavy these best sausages were. Pith and rind were swimming and sinking in the orange juice.

It felt to her as though she was wearing a headband that had slipped down across her forehead; this was sweat she realised, putting the back of one hand there. I’m so hot! She was coming true, she thought, putting it to herself as strangely as that. The way she spoke to herself in her head was just a little out, a little off. Coming true to that thing she’d thought of earlier—did she mean that? She was herself as a young girl, so foolishly affronted by the thermometer stuck into her mouth, she bit down on it. The shock she’d engendered in her poor parents. They were older than her friends’ parents, almost the previous generation, which
gave their relationship a tone of—what?—care rather than love? But that seemed unkind. They were attentive, peaceful, bemused mostly. Her father had chosen her mother when she had few prospects—she was thirty-four—and they’d eloped to avoid a wedding in which the couple would be congratulated by a lot of doubters and smirkers, as her mother had once told her. ‘They thought I’d have one sort of life,’ she said. ‘No one thanks you for proving them wrong.’ Teresa remembered holding her mouth open for her mother to pick the pieces of soft glass off her tongue. Bloodless. Then her father, quick to recover, was pulling back the blankets to chase the mercury around the bed. ‘It’s the devil to catch!’ he said, grinning at her. ‘Help me, won’t you?’

Her mother had left the room. ‘I won’t help wilful children,’ she said.

Wilful? This hurt. Because she was not wilful and that was why her mother had said it, she thought, to establish a line everyone considered was very far away. Somewhere in the remote distance such a person, strange creature, existed, but not here. Her father finally scooped the little pool of grey matter into his palm. ‘Got you!’ Its moving surface like a mirror but also like the backing of a mirror, flashing light and dulling it at once. No, she was not wilful. Yet could a single act, one event, cause everything to change?

‘Toxic,’ said her father sadly, leaving the room.

She was toxic, she thought for a moment, poisoning their simple eloping lives. They’d nursed her through the rheumatic fever. She was better.

At the solicitors’ office, she saved the fare for the ship, which took almost a year. And then she was saving some more, for living expenses and emergencies, though Pip said she could walk into a job in Salisbury no problem, be earning well soon after she strolled down the gangplank, if that was what it was called. Pip would come to Cape Town; she’d be waiting on the dock, and then they’d travel up together. Yet Teresa discovered she liked saving, the act itself. And as she became aware of her cousin Pip growing more expert in her new country, more casual
about its astonishments, not as detailed in her letters—fewer giraffes—Teresa felt less inclined to go. She’d be starting from so far behind. Thinking about how much she’d have to learn was a great disincentive to begin on that process, she discovered. Pip would have to be her teacher, which hardly mattered, she knew, it was just that she felt she’d done enough learning. She was impatient for life to begin, not for everything to begin again. And then towards the end of the second year of successful saving, she met Brendan.

Finally, at the apartment building, Teresa stood in front of the lift, her arms incredibly tired from carrying the bags of shopping even though the bags didn’t contain much, or any more than she was used to. She must be sick, she thought. Just then she became aware of two people standing beside her, a woman and a boy. They too were waiting for the lift. The woman caught her eye and smiled. The boy was looking at his feet. Suddenly Teresa turned away, pushing through the doors to the stairs with her shoulder. She had five flights. The stairs were a light well and sunshine fell on her blazing head. She began the climb. It was still vendredi.

In the early and dark hours of Saturday morning, unable to sleep, Paddy went downstairs to his office. A topic for ‘Speech Marks’ had come to him in bed and he had to check whether or not he’d already covered it: the glottal stop. Would that woo Gorzo back? What was he, his lucky charm? He found nothing on his computer and straight away made some notes. Then he turned off the machine.

On a bookshelf by the door, he saw the little bottle of oil he’d been given when he bought the bike. Next he was spreading newspaper under the bike and squirting oil onto the chain, slowly turning the pedal—just as he’d been instructed to do. It was nicely therapeutic. The cleverly interlocking links of the chain absorbed the oil and what they couldn’t use fell in neat drops onto the newspaper. Then he carefully screwed up the paper and took it downstairs to the wheelie bin at the back of the building. Before stepping out, he paused, listening for any sounds. Recently there’d been a flyer distributed to all the residents of the building warning them to take care, especially at night, and to be security conscious. Don’t hold the door open for anyone you don’t know. Druggies used the alleyway. It was silent. From outside he could look up and see the lights of their apartment and also his mother’s apartment. Her kitchen light was on.

The day after she moved in, she’d knocked on their door and said, ‘So what are the rules?’ What rules, they said. ‘It’s embarrassing,’ she said, ‘so I’ll make a start. Rule one, I will
not treat you as my new best friends. There’ll be no open door policy with me, for me. We should behave as though nothing has changed. I won’t be popping in all the time just because I can. I love you both dearly and hope to see a lot of you, but let’s not make regular appointments either. Rule two, I won’t come to you every Sunday with a pudding in my arms.’

‘Why not?’ said Paddy. ‘I love your puddings.’

‘I’m over puddings,’ said Teresa. ‘If you two don’t cook, then why should I?’

It was true; Paddy and Helena didn’t. She’d cooked for her husband and her daughter and he’d cooked for himself for years. They’d had enough of all that. There was a plastic box in the freezer labelled in Medbh’s hand, ‘Carbonara: eat for comfort!’ This went in the microwave. Medbh was ‘our girl’, that was what they called her. Has our girl been in today? they said. What has our girl left us?

‘Pretend I’m not there,’ said his mother. ‘Of course I’m here and it’s marvellous. But don’t listen out for me. Have you any rules for me? Please tell me one or make one up so it’s not just me being officious and strange.’

And Helena had embraced her, surprising her. ‘Teresa to consent to physical shows of affection from admiring, loving daughter-in-law.’

His mother was smiling. It moved Paddy to see this.

‘Rule two,’ said Paddy, ‘Medbh, “our girl”, will come to clean and cook for you once a week and we will pay for that.’ They’d been over this before.

‘I don’t need a girl,’ said his mother.

Helena said, ‘Teresa, I wanted you to have her twice a week, like us, so I’ve already compromised. Can you meet us here?’

‘But what will she do except twiddle her thumbs?’

‘No, Ma, that’s your job now,’ said Paddy.

For Paddy’s two sisters, Teresa’s move was perfect. Whatever guilty worries they had about their mother—her possible loneliness, the need for help in emergencies—seemed neatly stored in the vicinity of their brother, her only son. Stephanie,
the baby, with her small girls, no husband most of the time, and the right to kidnap Teresa whenever she needed to; Margaret, with the vague historical wound of antipathy towards them all, had a family and a life safely in Vancouver. What did Patrick have, the sisters wondered, except finally a settled and straightforward existence with a sane and grown-up person, in a nice apartment building? It had turned out that no one had really got on with Bridget.

For Helena and Paddy too, the move made sense. Helena loved Teresa as he did, for the qualities of her spirit: patience, selflessness, and a quietly efficient satirical streak. Helena also took reassurance from strains in Teresa’s personality that for a son were perhaps more ambiguous: her independence and her vast privacy. She wouldn’t pop in. Perhaps the women’s hug had carried something of this too: as opposed to being the start of increased intimacy—his mother was not a great hugger—it was a special occasion, contract-sealing moment? Thank you for these rules. We will leave each other alone as much as possible.

He looked into the theatrical night sky above his mother’s kitchen window. It was another windy night and in the foreground low dark clouds slid quickly over their building in the direction of the South Island, while behind them pale clouds were fixed in a stack, as if there were two skies. A rope might have been pulling the low clouds across a painted scene. The whole thing was backlit by a full moon. It was beautiful and intriguing, the setting for something, probably another round of ugly belting northerlies.

When they worried about emergencies with their mother they meant nothing much. A couple of months ago she’d fallen. In the middle of the night she felt ill and she’d gone to the bathroom where she vomited. It was something she’d eaten. She’d woken up on the bathroom floor, cold, and realised she’d passed out from the vomiting. She guessed an hour or so had gone by. She put her hand to her head and felt blood. In falling she’d struck her head on the side of the shower box. The wound
needed stitches. It was not the reason she’d moved next door but it was part of the background to the decision, and part of Paddy’s and Helena’s insistence that Medbh be involved too. Another set of eyes.

Paddy had talked to Stephanie about this, who agreed. And maybe Steph would tread gently for a while, he said. How else do I tread? she said. His sister was hurt at once. Go easy perhaps, he told her. ‘Easy? I’m easy! I’m the easiest one.’ She was reddening in her face, already beginning to get teary. He only meant that with the girls she should be aware of not putting too much onto their mother. ‘But she loves the girls! They bring her joy!’ Yes, they were lovely and also young and tiring sometimes. He wasn’t suggesting a ban or anything, merely a space. Stephanie had turned away from him and he saw her neck was a massive blotch. ‘Are you taking her from me?’ she said.

‘Don’t be silly,’ he said.

‘Then why is she moving into your building?’

‘Because you live in a two-bedroom house full of bunks.’

She turned back to him, eyes glistening, her anger instantly gone. She looked suddenly grateful, as though he’d solved a problem she’d been hounded by for a while. ‘Yes!’ she said. ‘Yes, where would we put her? In a cupboard?’

He slid back into bed as carefully as he could but Helena sat up at once and hit her pillow a few times. Then she took a sip of water from her glass.

‘What’s that smell?’ she said.

He got out of bed and washed his hands again. Now he was a cyclist, he would need to buy special jelly for getting oil and grease out of his skin. He wondered what Lant used. By the time Paddy came back, Helena was asleep again.

Lant had taken Paddy to the bike shop and made him buy the right bike. Pretty much it was his friend’s idea, though one Paddy had become curious about. Someone offers an idea about you, it’s interesting. ‘I feel you need to be fitter to face what you’re going to face,’ Lant told him.

Lant had been biking for about a year, following his marriage break-up. Since then he’d had a series of girlfriends—short-lived, immensely gratifying, he said—and he credited this success to a regular regime of punishing road work around the Wellington hills. He was fit. Lant was also trying other new things, having joined a band. This vaguely annoyed Paddy. Anyway, Lant had converted his hopelessly square childhood under a piano-teacher mother into a surprising guest gig as a violinist with a part-time countryish bar band, which put him in pubs late at night. Paddy saw his friend now had a collection of plaid shirts, a pair of boots, and even a denim jacket. He’d yet to see the costume in toto because he hadn’t seen the band. Lant was coy about dates and times. Every so often, one part of the identity would get an outing—he’d be wearing a string tie, say. It was as if Lant was preparing Paddy, or even himself, for the transformation.

‘What am I going to face?’ said Paddy. Life with Helena had been marked by a deep and certain aliveness. They’d lived together for almost eighteen months. The apartment purchase was the clincher. He’d been no Casaubon. The post-Bridget years had not been about hoarding, frequently the opposite. Now he was happy, the real thing.

‘Patrick, we’re fifty now,’ said Lant. It was a number with a certain weight and he added more by touching Paddy’s arm as he said it. ‘Fifty years,’ he said.

For his birthday in July, Helena and Paddy had gone to Rarotonga and been happy there, delighted, warmed, rained upon. ‘All right,’ he said.

‘How old were we when we first met?’ said Lant.

‘Twenty-four, five.’

‘Two men of fifty. Standing on the earth. Pinch me, I’m dreaming.’

Paddy pinched him on the back of his hand. He flinched and pulled it away. ‘Good news, Jeremy,’ said Paddy, ‘you might be ancient and of the earth but you still have feelings in the extremities.’

He rubbed his hand. ‘That may be more than you’ve got.’

‘Sorry,’ said Paddy, ‘but for me this last decade has seen major improvements. I feel in pretty good shape to face whatever’s around the corner. Barring a massive coronary or prostate cancer.’

Lant looked at his friend with renewed interest. ‘What are your symptoms?’

‘None,’ he said. ‘I feel fine.’

‘Good,’ said Lant, disappointed.

Fifty carried a certain threat but it was the truth that at forty Paddy had felt worse by far with everything in pieces and nothing settled. Married to the wrong person. In the wrong job, or in the wrong setting for that job. He’d walked out of the hospital. Jimmy Gorzo, Tony’s son, had been one of his last cases, a triumph. It was how he’d first met Tony. Paddy, together with the audiologist he’d worked with, had presented a paper on Jimmy at a conference in San Diego. That was Paddy’s big final act. He’d looked into the lights of the convention centre, seen the outline of three hundred heads listening to him—pretty nice, he thought. The hotel pool, he remembered, was in the shape of an ear.

Then what? He’d come home and for the next six months worked first on the concierge desk of a city hotel before demoting himself to kitchen-hand in the hotel’s restaurant. Such a massive retooling could probably never be accounted for by tracing incremental motions. It was all or nothing.

To Bridget he’d gone for nothing. She was a commercial property manager who’d watched her builder father die of asbestosis when she was sixteen. Of course they’d compared fathers. Anyway, she told Paddy he’d ‘menialised’ himself. Her
sound conviction was that to fall below a certain salary band was to invite a health disaster.

There was a uniform Paddy wore: grey jacket with the hotel insignia on its pocket, black trousers, white shirt. Lant thought it wasn’t quite the complete dissociative act. Hospitals, hotels, there was a connection of sorts. Institutions. The friends had suddenly grown interested again in each other after a period of not much contact. Lant now had a daughter too.

Lant wasn’t to blame but Paddy had developed a fairly refined, if fluid, rationale for the havoc he caused, a part of which was the self-serving notion that we had several lives to lead not the single one we’d settled for. There was also the deep response to whim, conventionally thought of as light. Yet whim could enter any life and turn it in a new direction. It was a whip, spurring us on to unlikely achievements. To her ultimate credit, when he’d said something about all this to Bridget, she gagged on the spot, actually retching in front of him. She had her hand to her mouth.

One might retrain to fight cancer or to fly a helicopter, drive an ambulance even, but what he’d done was all negative, she said. Turned himself off at the wall were her actual words.

At the hotel Paddy volunteered to do nights, the room service orders. Soups at midnight, muffins to lovers at 3am. Creepy salesmen. It gave him more time to drift around the hotel, to doze and take part in hi-jinks. Bridget was properly terrorised. All his thoughts about her at this time were basically satirical. Cracking up but not going foetal, abandoning his profession but working quite solidly and responsibly, he was a ball of confusion to behold and he felt little humanity. Better for everyone that he was at the hotel, which was basically the home of satire, pranks anyway. He knew he was being a prick and a lunatic. He had to be very polite and obsequious there in a massive sublimation of the aggression he felt. (Lant.)

Bridget: Shift workers are the worst placed of any among the employed. People working night shifts have more accidents, contract illnesses. Statistically et cetera.

Paddy: Your fury at me is also a risk factor. Your blood pressure. (She was on medication.) The angry use themselves up faster than anyone.

It’s you causing me to be angry!

You were furious before this, when I was helping keep our economic unit safe. And you didn’t care for what I did before. (True.) You live in a state of agitation. I think you get something from it, being furious. Then you collapse. It’s a cycle. (Tendentious and cruel.)

So you think I’m doing it on purpose?

No. But nor am I.

Nor are you working as a kitchen-hand on purpose you mean? That makes no sense.

He no longer seemed devoted to sense, she was correct. However, it wasn’t all nasty invention. Here he was referring to the fact that after they were married, every six months or so, she took to her bed, inexplicably, struck down. Nothing to do with her blood pressure, which was the first thing checked. Initially, he thought it was a pretend illness, no, he thought it was very serious, then he was suspicious. Diagnosis-wise, there was nothing, but the suffering was real and he saw he had to swing into action. For three days, four days, longer, he nursed her. Meals on trays. They had to put the phone on silent ring because it gave her a fright. She asked him to examine rashes on her arms and her back, as if he were a doctor. He only worked among them, was looked down on by them. Real doctors had examined her and she applied cream to no effect. She had flaky skin around her nose. She had a shake in her hands, burning sensations in her feet. Once she told him it was as though she were lying on an oven tray. Night was worst because the oven door closed and she was in the dark. She was very scared. He was frantic to find out a cause when it recurred. Then after the fourth or fifth time, they adjusted domestically. In temperature and appetite, despite the fieriness, she was always normal. She had MRI scans that showed nothing. She was not mad though, which was what she feared. He knew she was fairly mad but that
was different, to be mad in private. Mad at him, or along with him. Two psychiatrists had given her the all-clear. Some sort of chronic exhaustion perhaps? Rest. Yet rest made her over-tired.