Somebody Loves Us All (41 page)

Stephanie arrived at the apartment with her three girls just after 8am. She needed to get Isabelle to school by nine but she was desperate for them all to see their long-lost grandmother, gone two weeks. He had coffee ready for her, which she took and drank at once, moving through the apartment. She asked to borrow his hair-dryer and went into the bathroom. ‘Still assembling myself,’ she said.

Helena was already at work. She’d just been appointed to a government taskforce charged with reforming their industry. Step one: ban all black Mercedes.

The girls were in their coats and hats and mittens, bundled against the cold, and he helped them take a few layers off. He rubbed his hands over the cheeks of each of the girls in turn and they laughed as he did it. In friendship, the middle one, Sophie, showed him a small plastic creature that he recognised as the sort of thing teenage girls hung off their mobile phones. ‘Where’d you get that from?’ he said.

‘Daddy gave it to me,’ she said. It was the first he’d heard of Paul Shawn in months. ‘If I give it to Niamh, she’ll choke and die.’ There was nothing dire in the prediction, only a kind of curiosity.

A few minutes later, the Skype call came in on Paddy’s computer and he sat Isabelle and Sophie on chairs in front of the screen, while Paddy stood behind, holding Niamh, the toddler. A moment of black and then Teresa appeared, and beside her,
Pip. They were sitting in their hotel room, a bed could be seen behind them. They waved and called out to the children and Stephanie ran into the room, still brushing her hair, laughing and waving back.

‘Bonjour! Hello! Hello you people!’ said Teresa. Her mouth moved slightly ahead of the sounds.

‘Say hello to Nana,’ said Stephanie.

The girls sat and stared, mute, unmoving. They didn’t have access to Mummy’s computer at home. They were watching two things: Pip and Teresa but also themselves in the small box at the bottom of the screen.

‘Ça va?’ said Paddy.

‘Oui, oui,’ said Pip.

His mother said, ‘Look at you all! Hello Izzy, hello Soph. Where’s your sister?’

Isabelle turned slowly from the screen, all the time keeping an eye on her grandmother and on herself, as if the images might disappear, and slowly pointed at the child in Paddy’s arms. He bent down to show Niamh to the camera. She too had stopped wriggling in his arms and was focused on the heads inside the computer.

‘They’re in shock, Ma,’ he said.

‘The first time they’ve been quiet in days!’ said Stephanie. ‘Come on you lot, that’s your Nana there and Pip, you know Pip. Who can tell me where they are? Sophie, do you know where Nana and Pip have gone?’ The girl moved her head slightly. ‘I think you do. Isabelle?’ But Isabelle had leaned closer to the screen, lifting one finger. She wanted to touch it.

‘Are you going to school today, Izzy?’ said Teresa.

‘Answer then!’ said Stephanie.

With great reluctance, the girl slowly nodded her head and glanced at her sister, who sat back suddenly, afraid something might be addressed to her, fascinated too by the picture of her sister’s head moving up and down in the little box.

‘What are you doing with your hair, Steph?’ said Teresa.

‘Running a bit late this morning, Mummy. Sorry.’

‘Going okay?’ said Teresa.

‘Going great,’ said Stephanie. ‘We’ve hardly noticed that you’ve been gone. You know.’

‘How’s Paris?’ said Paddy. ‘How was Bastille Day?’

‘Marvellous!’ said Pip. ‘A million people on the move.’

‘But they don’t call it that,’ said Teresa. ‘They call it Quatorze Juillet. July the Fourteenth. We stood on the Pont du Carrousel, which is a bridge, not a carousel, though it felt like we were at a fair, and we watched the fireworks standing on the bridge, with a million other people, looking along the Seine, the river. The most incredible fireworks, girls!’

‘And we had a great view of the Eiffel Tower, all lit up,’ said Pip. ‘Fireworks would go off on the other side of the river and then they’d shoot out of the Eiffel Tower itself. Beautiful. Do you know the Eiffel Tower, Isabelle? Maybe Sophie knows it too. The big tower in Paris with the pointy top.’

‘They don’t know anything, Pip,’ said Stephanie. ‘They’ve been turned to stone.’

Teresa said, ‘We caught the Métro from near our hotel, thought we were very clever, leaving early and only travelling on the one line, no changing trains.’

‘We
were
clever,’ said Pip.

‘And so were about ten thousand other people who had the same idea. We got on the train and it was full. I mean, we had to squeeze in. I was bent over, to fit the shape of the curved roof, pressed right against the door. So was Pip.’

‘So was I.’ Pip mimed the position, hunching her shoulders.

‘Then the train got to the next station, doors open, and some more people get on. Not sure how they managed that but they got on and we were squeezed further into the compartment. Next stop, more people. Everyone going to see the fireworks. Okay, so now we are completely jammed in.’

‘Really tight.’

‘Tight? It was more than tight. Not just shoulder to shoulder. This was chest to chest, hip to hip, all body parts in contact.’

‘The woman beside me more or less had her nose in my ear.’

‘Yes!’ The two women were laughing now. The children remained silent witnesses. They studied the faces, the voices, reaching no conclusions, glancing at their own filmed heads. What was this strange performance? They didn’t even have TV. One day Stephanie had put it in the attic to save space, and to prevent Paul Shawn from turning it on when he visited.

‘Sounds awful!’ said Stephanie.

‘By the end Steph, the last few stops, and the train kept filling and filling, the people waiting on the platform would simply back in. Reverse in! They’d turn around and using their backs and their bottoms, insert themselves on board. A very effective technique actually.’

One of the girls sniggered: bottoms.

‘It saved them having to look anyone in the eye,’ said Pip. ‘So they didn’t see the “You have got to be kidding” look from the people already on the train.’

‘But that was the thing, no one said a word!’

‘No one said a word.’

‘No one could breathe,’ said Pip.

‘No, it was just—accepted,’ said Teresa. ‘It was Quatorze Juillet. It was the big day. Let everyone come! Everyone had to get on the train, all humanity. Young and old, tourists, locals. Everyone. To honour the Revolution.’ She’d read books throughout the summer. In English, she’d read Zola and Balzac. Then Victor Hugo. She still munched through her thrillers. She’d also borrowed primers from the Alliance Française, but she wouldn’t take lessons, that would be too much, she said. She’d met Camille regularly for coffee. ‘It was very important that no one got left behind. I think that was the spirit. People were laughing.’

‘Groaning.’

‘Laughing and groaning. Some Americans were near us, crushed but safe, it was safe too, somehow. An old couple, like us.’

‘Like us, exactly!’

‘And he said to her, “Was that our stop back there?”’

‘As if he could do anything about it!’

‘As if he was going anywhere. Everyone was going to the same place!’

‘Quite marvellous really,’ said Pip. She wiped her eyes from the laughter.

‘Anyway,’ said Teresa. ‘What’s your news?’

‘Oh, nothing much,’ said Stephanie. ‘No fireworks, no revolutions. But Isabelle lost a tooth.’

‘Oh, Isabelle! Lost a tooth! Can I see? Let me see, please. Open your mouth and show me or else I won’t believe it.’

The girl put her finger in her mouth and then she turned around and showed Paddy the gap before sitting back down and resuming her vigil by the screen. She could demonstrate to humans but not to those others.

In Paris, Pip and Teresa laughed.

Niamh slipped from Paddy’s hold and walked out of the room. Sophie saw this and got off her chair to follow. There were things in Uncle Paddy’s house that looked promising. He’d never shown them his office cupboard stash—that needed to stay there—but on the weekend, Helena had brought up a box of some of Dora’s old toys from the basement: dolls, plastic things, board games. Why not use them, she said. They were for Stephanie’s girls, only no one should tell Dora. They’d spent over an hour sorting the safe stuff from the hazardous. Isabelle waited a moment, and then she too was gone.

Stephanie and Paddy took the children’s places. ‘Got rid of the deadwood,’ he said.

Stephanie asked when they were leaving Paris and they went over their itinerary again. Capetown in two weeks. Originally they’d been looking at Canada, to take in Margie, but that had proved too difficult with the schedule, which was another slight for everyone in Vancouver. After Paris they were heading south, where apparently the accent was more musical, sing-songy, said Teresa.

‘Bonjour!’ Pip sang.

‘We’ve had wine with dinner,’ explained Teresa.

‘I was going to say, Ma,’ said Stephanie, ‘your accent. Is it just this line or is it weaker? It sounds weaker.’

‘Really?’ said Teresa.

‘I don’t think it does,’ said Paddy. He found he was annoyed with his sister for saying this. He felt she’d made the statement because she wanted it to be true. Also because she thought that Teresa wanted it to be true too. But hadn’t he thought the same thing, that their mother’s accent was a little less extreme? It had been eight months since it had first happened. She’d Skyped when they arrived in London and he sensed it for a moment then though he’d not said anything to Stephanie. Now he believed the accent was as strong as ever. They were getting used to her, that was all. Pip was saying something about a linguistic embarrassment they’d suffered, and Teresa joined in. He had to modify. Listening to the two voices together, he thought the cousins, despite their divergent histories, shared more and more. With her mother, Pip was sounding less, what? African. Teresa still sounded totally unlike her old self. But being together encouraged the softening of difference. They were meeting each other halfway or something. It wasn’t hard to imagine them on their bikes riding together up the North Island, speaking in this fashion to each other, flying across the volcanic plateau. He’d never spoken about the trip with Teresa. And he wasn’t sure Pip would have told her about telling him.

They were talking about learning French. ‘She has this head start,’ said Pip, ‘which is frankly unfair. Learn it, I say.’

‘Too old,’ said his mother.

‘Old-smold,’ said Pip.

‘Yes,’ said Stephanie. ‘But learn it back here, Mummy, won’t you. Come back and then transform your life.’

‘Oh no, I’m happy with my life as it is, thank you. Anyway, we hired bikes today. Paddy, this is the city for you. We biked all around. And we were approaching a pedestrian crossing.’

‘Yes!’ said Pip.

‘And we saw an old woman on the crossing with her little dog, he was coming along behind her on a leash. Then the
woman looks up, sees us, then sees there’s a car that doesn’t look like it’s going to stop, so she pulls hard on the leash and the dog is flipped onto its back and the old woman pulls him over the crossing on his back the whole way! The dog’s little legs waggling in the air. They get across and the woman flips him right side up with her shoe. Off they go again, no harm done.’

‘I don’t think I like that story,’ said Stephanie.

Paddy was again thinking about the two cousins back on bikes together.

‘What does it feel like Mummy, to be finally there?’ said Stephanie.

‘Amazing,’ said Teresa.

‘But do you feel anything, I don’t know, special? Given all the bother and everything you’ve been through?’

Teresa had started to speak over the top of her daughter, as if she’d missed it. The fractional delay on the line made this half-convincing but the stronger sense was that she wanted the subject closed. ‘But listen, have you seen what Pip is wearing? Can you see it? Show them, go on. Show it to the camera. She bought it yesterday. The most beautiful necklace.’

‘I don’t wear jewellery,’ said Pip.

‘But you should.’

‘I don’t know. Your mother persuaded me. It was a huge amount of money.’

‘No, it wasn’t.’

‘I like this anyway.’

‘Show them.’

Pip stood up and leaned forward, bringing an object close to the camera. It blurred and filled the screen, sparkling briefly in focus and then scrambling, obscuring the women completely, which was probably, he thought, his mother’s precise purpose. She had respite for a moment. She was invisible. Or she was the background. She was present and absent.

‘Beautiful,’ said Stephanie.

That morning while he was working with Robert, his nine-year-old with Down’s syndrome, a small earthquake shook the room, and as he always did when this happened, Paddy stood up at once, waited a few seconds then sat down again. He considered the doorway. There was nowhere to run. Robert had been building a tower and it had fallen. But the city still stood. Everyone within the earthquake’s sphere was fine. He thought of Helena, his sister and her girls, he thought of Lant, all the others. The Gorzos, immune in Lower Hutt.

Why had they ever left the Hutt? But the fault-line went there too, didn’t it. No one was safe.

In the apartment, under the stairs they had water that needed to be changed, a torch that didn’t work, and no food. They were ready for anything.

Robert looked at him and laughed, and then he stood up and sat down too. Paddy laughed and the boy repeated the action. He did it a third time and Paddy said, ‘Okay, Robert.’

‘Okay,’ said the boy. ‘Okay, Robert.’

‘Very funny,’ said Paddy.

‘Very funny, Robert,’ said Robert.

After lunch he went for a bike ride out past the airport and it was impossible to resist certain apocalyptic thoughts along the lines of, This is all reclaimed land, loose sediment basically. Later in the afternoon he met Helena at a café. She hadn’t felt the earthquake at all, though apparently a few students from more stable places had become quite upset. She found them gathered around the desk where Iyob worked. He was calming them down.