Somebody Loves Us All (30 page)

‘At a certain point I became aware of a different kind of shadow and a scent too. I lifted my head and saw that the road had entered a forest. Pine trees lined both sides. There was an apron of ground maybe ten yards wide leading up to the trees and this was covered in brown pine needles. Clumps of these needles had been blown onto the road and swirled into largish neat piles. It looked a bit like someone had raked them into these piles. So we rode over them, through them. We kicked at them with our feet. The setting was suddenly private, as if we were biking along a friend’s driveway, ruining someone’s hard work. We shouted with all our strength, whooping in the deserted alley of those trees. It was a huge and inspiring freedom after the tense watchfulness and doubt of the Desert Road. We were alongside each other and we took turns to ride out across the other side of the road, shouting at the nonexistent oncoming traffic, daring it to appear and crash into us. There was even a gentle downward slope to the road and we went fast, eating up the distance. The mountains were no longer visible behind us. We knew we’d made it! We’d got through to the other side and now all we had to do was carry on to the lake, or perhaps even risk stopping in nearby Turangi since it was so late. We could ride to the lake in the morning and swim before lunch.

‘Then far ahead of us we saw something shiny by the side of the road, on the apron. As we got nearer, we could make out the shape of a car.

‘Do you believe in presentiment, Paddy? I mean in some notion of foretelling?’

Automatically he touched his ear.

‘I do not,’ said Pip, ‘unless it’s tied to human agency. To the ordinary powers we all have of paying attention, of noticing, of surmise, of guesswork. Do I believe objects tremble with their own futures, signalling their import to us? No.

‘The African day the people came to our property with the gun and the blindfold and the rope for tying me up, I thought it a day like any other. Later, I thought of certain things. Afterwards, I considered the signs. A broken bottle by the mailbox that morning. A dog I didn’t know walking in the middle of the road. A commotion nearby, raised voices, angry shouting, that was quickly over, too quickly perhaps, as if someone had had second thoughts and then he was silenced, everyone on edge? Were these signs, or even part of the thing itself? At the time I thought I was hearing an argument between the labourers working on the little relay power station at the end of our street. They were patching its crumbling concrete walls. I’d gone past them a few times that week and they were a rowdy, good-humoured bunch. Signs? Dogs walked everywhere. I didn’t know them all. Bottles broke. No, these weren’t harbingers. But you think on things after the event. It’s a helpless act, to want to have seen it coming. Ah, yes, obvious.

‘Where we were living, at that moment in history, in Zimbabwe, you could argue we saw it coming, some might say even that we had it coming, and if we didn’t know we were just too—blind, stupid, for our epoch. Look I’ve gone off track again.’ Pip reached for her glass of water and as she drank she was looking at Paddy through the bottom of the glass. It gave him the sense that she doubted he’d been listening or thought he would stop listening to her now. She had to keep him engaged, even while she was drinking water. ‘Where was I?’

‘The car,’ said Paddy.

‘Your mother and I both saw the car at the same time and we wondered. We looked at each other quickly, just a glance but enough to see the smallest disturbance in each other’s eyes, nothing like fear or fright but the upset of our joy, a sobering, and of course we’d left off shouting and kicking the needles. Certainly the car put a stop to that. It was as though we’d come across the owner, the owner of the road, of the forest. The Master. Hushed, we heard our tyres against the surface of the road and the tiny crunching of the needles we passed over.

‘We biked close to one another on our side of the road, heading towards the car.

‘Concentrating so tightly on the car, trying to make out its purpose, whether there were any occupants, created an odd alternating feeling in me. At one moment it seemed we were reeling in the vehicle, drawing it to us along the avenue of trees, and then the opposite. The car was like some magnet, it sucked us towards it or sucked our ideas about the day out of ourselves. I may be dangerously close to what I’ve just denied about foretelling, presentiment. Yet I thought of the rain clouds we’d seen far off on the hills by the Desert Road, the dark band connecting sky and earth but without a sense of direction. It was similar. I didn’t know what was happening.

‘I could see Teresa had a similar intentness on her face. She was peering, trying to work it out at the earliest possible moment. And all the time a million innocent explanations went through my head. The car was abandoned. The car’s owner was going for a walk in the bush, or he was a hunter. Someone had stopped for a rest, for a drink from a thermos. The call of nature. A man would appear soon from the trees pulling up his trousers, a bit sheepish, and he would wave at us. The obviousness of its position—parked just off State Highway One—worked in its favour.

‘Getting nearer it looked as though the car was empty. There were no signs of movement. I felt the tension ease up through my
legs and shoulders. I’d been unaware of this nervous grip. I gave Teresa a smile when she looked at me. She returned it.

‘We were almost alongside the car when its driver’s door swung open and a man who’d been slumped down in his seat stretched a leg, then got out of the car quickly. He took a few steps towards us, holding up his hand. We braked and stopped. Perhaps that was the moment when we should have accelerated past him, swerved out onto the other side of the road and biked off. I’m sure we both thought of it.

‘“Girls,” he said. “Girls! Are we pleased to see you!”

‘We looked towards the car and saw a young woman, a few years older than us perhaps, who’d also been slumped down in the passenger seat, gradually work her way up. She didn’t get out of the car, however, but she was looking at us carefully. I wasn’t sure whether she’d been asleep and we’d woken her. It wasn’t a friendly look. The man was stretching his arms over his head as if he’d been sleeping. “Our saviours,” he said.’

At this point Paddy became aware of the phone ringing and although he told Pip that they could ignore it, she was insistent that he pick it up. She would use the break to go to the bathroom. ‘Comfort stop,’ she said, moving from the sofa as he answered the phone.

It was Murray Blanchford from the hospital. He’d just spoken to Teresa. They’d set the MRI appointment for the following day. Obviously this would give them a clearer idea of what, if anything, was going on. From his conversation with Teresa, he understood that she was in the same position as when he’d examined her—was this Paddy’s feeling too? It was. Excellent. The line seemed to go dead for a moment and then Blanchford came on again, apologising. A moment later, they were saying goodbye.

At once Paddy thought of the things he hadn’t asked. He’d wanted to get Blanchford’s opinion on her tiredness, the pattern of sleeping and waking. Also he thought he should have said how they’d been expecting him to call earlier and his failure to do so had caused anxiety. Doctors should know this stuff,
even very important brain doctors. The conversation had gone so fast. Blanchford had given the impression that Paddy was in a queue, which perhaps he was, and their time was extremely limited.

Pip came back into the room and sat down again. ‘Is it all right to go on, Paddy?’

He told her what Blanchford had said.

‘I can be there at the hospital, if you want me there, that is.’

‘That’s very kind.’

‘But I’m very worried now. I’m using up all your time.’

He waved this away, continue.

‘Okay, if you’re sure. I’m not entirely without hope that maybe this long-winded anecdote has some bearing on what’s happened to Teresa.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Not sure. Sorry. I’m ahead of myself. Anyway, it’s information I’m … relieved to share finally with someone. You can do with it whatever you like. Where were we?’

‘“Our saviours”,’ he said. ‘The man in the car. He called you his saviours. With the woman.’

‘Yes! The man. Funny, I have trouble picturing him. He was maybe in his early thirties or a little older. Clean-shaven. Average height, thin. Light complexion. No scars. It was how I went over in my mind the description I’d give to the police when they asked for a description. In truth, I can’t remember really what his face looked like to see into. Or I’ve preferred not to remember for so long that now I can’t.’

‘The police?’ said Paddy.

Pip held up a hand, begging him to hold off. ‘Perhaps it was because we’d been in, I don’t know—the rhythm of strangers’ kindness for the previous days, throughout the trip, and here was an opportunity to repay some of that but Teresa said at once, very brightly, “How can we help?”

‘It was painful to hear these words. I felt we were immediately in further than we should have been. This is stupid of course. What were our options? We were on bikes, in the middle of
nowhere and it was night though still easy enough to see twenty or thirty yards ahead of us.

‘“Hear that, doll?” the man said to the woman in the car. “So nice!
So
nice!”

‘The woman’s lip curled back slightly and she turned away again. She had messy blond hair. Yes, I’d made a judgement on her already! Caught out here with this man and now involving us in whatever was going on. I was not much more than a schoolgirl and my imagination was as conventional as they come. I couldn’t understand a person like her at all.

‘Then the man explained they’d run out of petrol, which was his fault entirely though the gauge was temperamental and he thought they had enough and then it had plummeted suddenly and without warning, giving him just enough time to swing the car around and drift to a stop here since they had been going in the opposite direction but figured it was safer to fill up this side of the Desert Road, hence their predicament. He addressed most of his speech to Teresa, I noticed, as if already identifying her as an ally and myself as something else to be decided on later. Divide and rule was a phrase I’d heard without completely understanding it and now I wondered whether this was it in action. He had a rapport at once with her.

‘“Oh, that’s bad luck!” said Teresa. “How long have you been here?”

‘“Not long,” said the man. “But there’s no one out tonight, not a soul. A logging truck went by but maybe he was on a mission, I don’t know.” He held up his hands and shrugged, smiling. Small teeth. I remember now he had small teeth. He approached Teresa’s bike and put a finger on her handlebars, his index finger. “You girls been biking through?”

‘“We’ve just come through,” said Teresa.

‘“That’s a good effort! Hey, doll, that’s a good effort, isn’t it, these girls have come through right now.” He held out his hand to Teresa. “My name’s Duncan. Dunkin’ Biscuits is what they called me, I don’t mind. You are?”

‘We gave him our names. He shook my hand too. My mouth
was so dry that Teresa had to repeat my name so he could understand it. Then he told us the woman’s name was Ginny. “Genevieve really but I shorten it, which she doesn’t like.”

‘Teresa told him we were heading for Taupo that night but we’d probably stay in Turangi since it was late. We didn’t know anyone there or anywhere since we were from Wellington en route to Auckland where we only knew one person. When we got there, she said, whenever that was, since we didn’t have a strict schedule, that person would ring our parents to say we’d made it.

‘Duncan listened to her story with a smile and lots of appreciative nodding. At every new piece of information she gave him, my heart lurched.

‘Now your mother was no fool, Paddy, and, out of the pair of us, I’d have had no problem in being judged the one who possessed the greater naivety. I was unworldly and guileless on a grand scale, I remember. If I felt our journey suddenly compromised and threatened in some unknown way by this pair by the side of the road, I also wondered whether Teresa, in her apparently mindless chirpiness, was playing the situation in the only way she could. I simply found myself unable to speak. The man saw my terror as obvious as day. It was only Teresa’s sweetness and openness that could distract him.

‘But distract him from what? We didn’t know. He stood again in front of Teresa’s bike, gently touching the handlebars. We both still straddled our bikes. I thought then I might just have a chance of biking off before he could catch me. There was still a slight downhill slope on the road and I’d be a few good pulls away before he managed to get out from in front of the other bike. In the time he was chasing me, Teresa could head off as well, either in the same direction, and attempt to dodge him on her way through, or back the way we’d come. She’d eventually come across someone who could help or somewhere she could hide. We’d be separated and I had no idea where I was going or how I’d find her again but we’d be free from the forest. These thoughts were making my pulse race so much
I had to run my hands down my sides to wipe the sweat off them.

‘Meanwhile Teresa and Duncan were trying to work out the best way of getting petrol for the car. Suddenly I wondered whether the car even needed petrol. The whole thing might be a trap. This meant that if we tried to bike off, he’d just come after us in the car.

‘I heard Teresa make an offer that was the first sign she was thinking along similar lines to me. She said that we’d carry on into town and tell the man at the petrol station about Duncan and Ginny stuck out here. They could then send someone out with petrol.

‘Duncan shook his head and said that was going to cost a lot of money because they’d have to pay for the car with the man in it as well as the petrol. Then there was the issue that some people, especially those who ran petrol stations, weren’t always as nice and understanding as people like us. They’d want to go home for their dinner ahead of driving five miles to help a fellow human being.

‘“If I could borrow a bike,” he said, “I’d get the petrol and bike back here fast as, then we could all get going again on our little journeys.”