Somebody Loves Us All (38 page)

‘You had a good point though, you
have
a good point,’ said Paddy.

‘Oh, I am right. I know I am right. I have a holiday but then
that is my job. Goodness me. They cannot make me stay away, are you joking.’ He checked his watch and moved off a few steps. ‘My son is not very fast. Can he win? We shall see but I think he likes too many of these—’

‘What?’

‘You know,’ he patted his stomach, ‘Happy Meals.’

They rang from Paddy’s office, since the phone had a speaker facility. Murray Blanchford asked who was in the room and they made the introductions. Pip was there too.

‘What about Margie?’ said Teresa. She was on Paddy’s chair, by the desk, and so had put herself slightly apart from the rest of them. Once she’d taken that position, she looked around, unsure whether it was best. Paddy thought maybe she’d hoped to be away from consoling hands, away from Pip but also her children at the moment of truth, to be there in the room but not be there. And yet by taking his seat, she realised she was the object of attention, easily the room’s focus.

Teresa was looking at him. He hadn’t forgotten about his older sister. It was just too hard, the wrong time of day. You left the country, you paid the price. Rain for eighteen days straight.

‘Yes, we can call Margie later,’ she said, agreeing with everyone’s thoughts. ‘No point in bothering her.’

Her cousin was perched in a temporary-looking way on the chair Sam Covenay used, by the door. She could slip out if that was how they wanted it.

The phone was on a side-table next to the small sofa, where Stephanie and Paddy sat. Paddy adjusted the volume as Blanchford started talking. He was thanking them for their patience. There’d been a few problems. Not with the scans themselves but with the process by which he’d finally received them and he needed to apologise. Things had taken longer than they should have. Now what he was about to say was still in the nature of preliminary findings. He had to say that. He was yet to write up his notes. However, in this context, they should
understand that preliminary was not the same as half-baked or sketchy or likely to change. Simply it meant he hadn’t done the paperwork. Very well. ‘Teresa,’ he said.

His mother sat up in her chair, alarmed, with an almost guilty look on her face, as if she’d been caught doing something. The voice in the phone did have a sort of all-seeing quality, Paddy thought. The voice of God, or something from
Charlie’s Angels
.

‘Yes?’ she said. ‘Yes, I’m here.’

Beside him on the sofa his sister took a short breath. His own head was pounding suddenly.

‘I’ve looked very closely at the scans from the MRI. We got some very good images, very clean and detailed. I was very pleased with the information we got. And my finding is this. There’s nothing there. Everything looks normal. The scans are completely clear. You have a completely normal-looking brain.’

Everyone processed this for a moment. This was a doctor and sometimes doctors said one thing and you heard another. They spoke a different language.

‘I’m very happy to say,’ said Blanchford, ‘the scans are clear.’

Still the language didn’t penetrate. No one moved. What was he saying? What were their instructions? Something held them in their places. On the sofa, Paddy was unable to shift even his hand. His wrist seemed locked, and his neck.

They couldn’t look at one another. It was an absolute pause.

‘So that’s good,’ said the voice.

Then finally a noise came from someone—from Steph, he guessed. A little cry.

He might have shot up from the sofa then and leaped in the air. Thrown a fist above his head and jumped again. ‘Yes!’ He might have danced in front of the sofa. He might have sung: ‘The scans are clear, there’s nothing there! The good old scans are clear!’ He was capable of the eruption. They’d all been ready to burst. Yet Blanchford’s marvellous and hoped-for conclusion, though an immense relief, was also the curious
extension of the status quo. It was progress but also not. It was another deferral, and in its knowingness, there remained a core of ‘we don’t know’. They knew what wasn’t there but this still left the question of what was, since Teresa was the same. She wasn’t cured.

This was preventing anyone from doing much with the good thing they’d heard.

And, he thought, it was a good thing. Teresa wasn’t going to die from this. She was going to carry on. More or less in the same way? Which seemed the crux—here was the new reality. Murray Blanchford, mountain biker and brain man, meant this, did he?

His mother, he saw, was looking at the floor. Stephanie was glancing around, as if trying to get her bearings, or memorise details of the room. Pip had turned an ear to the phone, where Blanchford was continuing to speak.

In the next week or so they’d receive a letter, which would be the official end to the business or that part of it at least. ‘Can I just offer my congratulations,’ said Blanchford, ‘on—having such a fine-looking brain, Teresa. Of course these are my favourite calls and I do want to let you folk get on with your day. Okay.’

His mother cleared her throat. ‘Thank you,’ she said. She stood up.

‘One aspect remains,’ said Blanchford. And here it was, and Paddy wished the voice turned off. ‘The matter of the acquired accent. Having eliminated sinister cause, there may still be ongoing consultation with regard to that issue. Paddy will have ideas, therapeutic remedies and so on. It’s of interest to me, I must say, if that doesn’t sound too coolly objective. Fascinating really. But I’m going to leave that for another day. I’ll say goodbye to you all.’

Paddy pressed the button on the phone. ‘Well,’ he said. He stood.

Then Stephanie let out a choking sob and, without meeting her mother’s eye, went towards her in a blind sort of stagger,
knocking against her chest. Teresa held her sobbing daughter in her arms, stroking her hair. Then Stephanie straightened up and smiled and went over to Paddy’s desk where there was a box of tissues.

‘I’ll need those too,’ said Pip, who’d stood up and was coming towards her cousin. Soundlessly, tears were rolling freely down her cheeks. They hugged, and were fiercely locked together for several moments.

Then Paddy hugged his mother hard, hugged her bones, though she wasn’t bony.

Finally Teresa was released.

She alone was dry-eyed. She stepped a little away from them, but only to take them in, to see them in a single view. She was smiling, her mouth closed. Had she ever looked so beautiful, so strange.

‘How amazing,’ she said, though she sounded not especially amazed. It was almost how she used to sound when they were children and they told her urgent and fascinating things and she received them with a calm curiosity that seemed to miss the point of their excitement, or to make another point altogether, something about preparing yourself for whatever might be round the corner, for what would happen next. It used to drive them crazy, this calm. How amazing.

After Pip left for Palmerston North, and Stephanie had gone off to collect Isabelle from school, they walked into town. Teresa was meeting up with Steph and all her girls later at the playground at Frank Kitts Park in the sunshine. The girls hadn’t seen their grandmother since before she’d had to cancel their weekend away, hadn’t heard her, though they’d been told Teresa had a sore throat which made her voice sound ‘funny’. It was agreed an outdoor reunion would be best. The girls could run off and play whenever they felt it was getting too weird.

Paddy asked his mother if this was a good idea. Didn’t she want to rest? The trial of Blanchford’s call must have had an
impact, he thought. Didn’t she need to absorb the information? She said, What information?

He felt flat. Oh perhaps she was right. He wanted to get out of the apartment. Was it time to ‘trust a little to the energy which is begotten by circumstances, something something’, he’d have to look it up. Good old George Eliot! There were circumstances at hand for sure.

Before they left, Teresa had put a bar of chocolate in her bag. It was all she had. ‘Bribe,’ she told Paddy. ‘And so they’ll still know it’s me.’ She also put in a book, in case Stephanie was late. She loved to sit and read outside. She said she had a few favourite places in Lower Hutt.

‘I didn’t know that,’ he said.

‘You don’t know everything.’

He asked to see the book.
Le
Petit Nicolas,
in French. A children’s book, an old paperback, with someone’s pencil marks throughout. She’d found it in a second-hand bookshop the other day with Pip. ‘It was only five dollars. Can’t follow it at all but I like the drawings. And someone else has struggled with it too, which I like. I don’t have to look up every word in my little dictionary.’

‘Okay,’ he said, ‘so you’re going with it, the French thing.’

‘Going with it?’ she said. ‘Even that sounds a bit decisive. Keeping things open, is that a better way of putting it? I don’t know, Paddy. I really don’t know. Winging it maybe?’

On Cuba Street, Paddy stopped his mother in front of the bakery that Camille and Pierre owned. Suddenly it seemed a long time ago that he’d looked into this same window on the night he went drinking with Lant. He suggested they buy some things for the girls, to augment the chocolate bribe. Could Niamh, the little one, even eat chocolate? Teresa stared at the pastries and cakes. ‘Oh, this looks too rich, Paddy.’ Only then did she see that the names of everything were written in French. ‘What is this place?’

Camille was at the counter. ‘Bonjour!’ she said.

‘Bonjour!’ said Paddy.

‘Bonjour,’ said Teresa.

‘Ça va? You are well?’

‘Since the last time you saw me, I am very well, thank you,’ he said. ‘And I’d like you to meet, how do you say that in French?’

‘Puis-je vous présenter,’ said Camille.

‘Camille, puis-je vous présenter mon mère!’

‘Ma mère,’ said Camille. ‘Because your mother is feminine.’

‘Ma mère! But she’s my mother and I’m masculine, she belongs to me.’

‘It is the noun that rules it, not the speaker.’ Camille smiled and shook Teresa’s hand. ‘Enchantée.’

‘Je m’appelle Teresa, or if you like, Thérèse.’

‘Ah, vous apprennez le Français? You are learning French?’

His mother laughed. ‘No, no.’

‘But show her your book,’ said Paddy.

‘No, really.’

‘Here,’ he said. He’d slipped his hand inside her bag and was bringing it out, the old paperback. ‘Regardez!’

Camille looked at it. ‘Petit Nicolas! J’adore! At home, we have these books.’

‘I just look at the pictures,’ said Teresa. ‘Les illustrations?’

‘Oui, oui, les illustrations, sont plus belles, ah?’

‘I’m sorry, I don’t understand you.’

‘Beautiful. And drôle, funny.’

‘They are, yes.’

‘Très simple. Very simple, a few lines.’

‘Oh yes, but—’

‘Yes?’ said Camille.

‘Sad?’ said his mother.

‘Voilà! C’est vrai. A bit sad. Triste.’

‘Yes, or something melancholy about them. Melancholy in French?’

‘Mélancolie.’

‘That’s easy,’ said Paddy.

‘Yes, same word. We make it easy for you English speakers sometimes! La mélancolie.’

‘Feminine,’ said Teresa.

‘Bien sur! Of course!’

They turned to look at the sweet things. They bought up large.

Walking along afterwards, his mother asked about therapeutic remedies, which had been Blanchford’s phrase. Paddy told her she would have to make an appointment. But she wouldn’t be interested in going to him, she said—he was children. Then he would refer her to someone else who dealt with the elderly. And infirm, she added. Using this comically as a prompt, he linked his arm through hers. Come on then, old dear, he said. Let’s help you along.

He felt a gush of privilege. How to put this? He experienced the most sublime sense of being close to a great work, walking with her. He felt astonished.

He said goodbye to his mother in Civic Square. She was crossing at the overbridge to the park. He watched her walking quickly up the steps, under a cloudless blue sky, carrying her bag of French goodies. The sea smelt fresh, almost salt-less. The smell, the sky, the whole set-up, was auspicious, he felt in a silly way, carrying the notion forward from Blanchford’s phone call, the meeting with Camille. He recalled something Bridget had once said when they were walking by the harbour, that she’d prefer it if the sea didn’t contain fish. She’d not meant it as a joke at all or whimsy. She didn’t joke. It was simply an aspect of the world she found wrong. Another thing she said, more helpful this time: always sleep with a pillow between your knees—it was good for your back. And this was what he did most nights. Marry someone, the wrong person, live together for years, stomp around on each other’s hopes and dreams, and take this one piece of wisdom from all that.

In the morning the pillow would be at the bottom of the bed, or on Helena’s side. They called this pillow Bridget. Where’s Bridget? they said. The spirit was affectionate, or Helena wouldn’t have gone along with it. In a perfectly low-key way, he was curious about Bridget’s life now, where was she? There was no chance he’d seek the facts. Last time, a few years ago, he’d heard Shanghai. Amazing.

He needed a new back light for his bike. The original one had dropped off and cracked when he’d been putting his bike away in the basement. It was now his recreation to visit the bike shops and browse. He found these places intoxicating, sort of blinding. He frequently spent more than seventy dollars on something.

In front of the City Gallery people lay on the grass. Some were office workers with their shoes off, their shirts undone, giving themselves up to the late spring heat. Neil Dawson’s shining metal globe hung above them, suspended on wires, a delicate fern cut-out of the planet but strong enough to handle the worst winds. Two tourists were taking a photo of it, craning their necks, pointing the camera up through the earth.

There were also students on the grass, talking in groups, drinking from water bottles. They had their books open in front of them.