Somebody Loves Us All (42 page)

‘What was he saying?’ said Paddy.

‘That our building was wooden and even in the strongest quake, it would move and bend and not collapse. That it was also on bedrock and this was the safest place to be. That there were thousands of earthquakes every year in Wellington but that no one had been killed or injured in over a hundred and fifty years. He spoke very slowly, with great authority. I was convinced myself.’

‘Good old Iyob.’

‘Then he saw me and he said the
other
language school, which is nearer the harbour, was not built on bedrock, and if a big earthquake happened, the ground would be liquefied and the students of that school would all find themselves in the middle of the sea.’

‘I think that should be on your website.’

They had coffee and cake and he told her about the Skype conversation with Teresa and Pip, the frozen girls, the excitement in the travellers’ voices. And then, prompted by nothing in particular except her presence and the truth, he told her he loved her.

‘I like to hear that,’ she said. ‘All of it.’ Their knees were touching under the table. ‘But love does not flourish everywhere. Some bad news. Dora and Medbh have broken up.’

‘Oh, I’m sorry to hear that.’

‘Dora’s a mess.’

‘I can imagine.’ He thought of the box of her toys, spread over the apartment floor. He’d have to hide all that. She’d be round that evening.

‘We’ll see her tonight. She’s coming over.’

‘Of course,’ he said. ‘Yes. Awful.’

Helena looked at him and laughed. ‘God, Paddy, you’re a terrible liar.’

‘No, I—’

‘I mean it’s not a bad trait, to be unable to pull off a deception.’

‘I must admit, mostly it’s you I feel for. The stress for you.’

She shrugged. ‘I’m her mother.’

He took her hand. ‘You know, I am sorry.’

‘Actually more than you know,’ she said. ‘It means we’ve lost Medbh too. She rang me at work, such a sweet person, and said in light of present circumstances blah blah.’

He sat back in his chair. ‘But—’

‘Who will feed us?’

‘Yes.’

‘Who will look after us?’

‘Exactly.’

They looked out the café window. It was a sunny winter’s day, with enough heat in the air to confuse people into leaving their coats at home. In an hour or two the temperature would plummet. His mother meanwhile was across the world, in summer. She slept, she said, without blankets or sheets in a tiny room in Paris with an electric toilet. Her bed pulled down from the wall and in the morning she could turn on the jug without sitting up. She’d be sleeping now.

He walked to Manners Mall to buy new batteries for the torch they kept under the stairs. Crossing Cuba Street, he heard loud footsteps and turned to see two figures: the chaser and the chased. There was the security guard, white-shirted, heavy-shoed, holding his walkie-talkie, chest pushed forward, weaving in and out of the pedestrians, struggling; and here was the other guy, arms pumping, sneakers slapping the paving, going straight. People stopped and watched, just as he was doing. The runner came close to him. Paddy stepped aside, making way. He heard the breathing and saw the face. Recognising him, in a reflex, Paddy almost called out his name.

He’d managed to stop himself. The dark figure flashed by. It was terrible of course, what had he done? What had he set in motion? It occurred to him that he was thinking, and not without pride: I taught that boy everything he knows. Then the thought passed and he went into the shop to buy his batteries.

The following morning he hadn’t scheduled a clinic. He was going to use the time to write his newspaper column. They’d called him a few weeks after his farewell column, asked him to unretire. There’d been letters. How many? he asked. A number. Yes, but what was the number? Well, he had to understand that for every person who actually put pen to paper, there were fifty, sixty, seventy, more, who shared the same feeling. These were the silent readers. Chaucer, he recalled immediately, was known
as The One Who Reads Without Moving His Lips, that was a mark of his genius. Okay then, he’d carry on for his silent readers. And he did have new ideas—that was the real surprise, the marker not of his genius but of his ongoingness. Besides, he had the new image of himself quite literally in the form of Sam Covenay’s revised portrait. The paper could use it. He was ready to start. Yet on this morning, he began instead an account of his mother’s experience, starting from the moment she’d woken to hear about the French truck drivers making the snail on the motorways, when she knew it was vendredi, a windy day last Novembre. It was the morning she’d tried without success to buy goat’s cheese, and had been told how well she spoke English. It was just before he’d wheeled the bicycle into the apartment. For a few months now he’d been talking to Helena and Lant and even to Tony Gorzo about doing it, but it seemed he had to wait until his mother was safely out of the country. How lost he suddenly felt without her! He wished she were back. And was pleased she wasn’t. For the obvious reason she was loving it. And for another reason. This. He couldn’t imagine writing such a thing with her just through the wall, listening to him.

She'd booked online. The hotel was on rue de la Montagne, handy, and ranked number three in popularity on TripAdvisor for Montreal. His mother, as always, had done her research. She knew not to reserve a room on the side overlooking the street students used as a cut-through to the nearby university. The breakfast she understood to be so-so and overpriced. The staff, unless they'd also been reading TripAdvisor and either wanted to improve their image or go over to the dark side, would be polite but not super-friendly, an observation some people might have justifiably made of her, Paddy thought.

This was two years on from the time he was writing about. It hadn't happened yet.

Teresa was in Montreal for three nights, having flown from Vancouver that day, where she'd visited Margie, an occasion that had been judged a success, even by Margie. Had there been a TripAdvisor on Margie, it was unlikely she'd have rated super-friendly, maybe not even polite. Anyway, everyone had behaved. And Teresa had unbelievably been on a float plane above Vancouver Island with Margie and one of Margie's two sons, Nathan, the little one he was called, though he was over six feet, bigger-looking in the small plane and thin, so thin, folded like origami almost. She'd emailed Paddy. Amazing sights. All is good. Tx. This from a woman with bona fide aviophobia. Perhaps his sister had wanted to terrify their mother by taking her up in the air. Whatever, Teresa had said yes. She'd said, do what you like with me, I'm ready for anything. And she also
emailed that she had given Margie the piece salvaged from their father's printing set: the mould of the sun. She'd wrapped it in cloth. What's this, what's this, Margie had said, rolling it open on her palm. Then she saw the thing. Well, I waited. She looked. I waited. And it did not come flying back at me. No. Not at all. The memento was received with a great gulp. Thank you was even said. Of course she soon wanted to know what I'd done with this and that. Of course she did. She wanted to know what you others had got. Dear Margie.

The next evening, the other of Margie's sons, Will, an engineering student, was waiting in the lobby of the hotel to meet his grandmother for dinner. Eventually he went up to the desk. They phoned Teresa's room but no one answered. He sat back down again to think. He texted his girlfriend who told him what to do. Maybe Teresa was asleep. Go up and try again. Break down the door, ha ha.

As a girl Teresa had contracted rheumatic fever, which would now come into play as a contributing factor in her heart failure. Aged eleven or twelve, they knew, she'd had weeks in bed, which sounded great. She told Paddy about this when he was a teenager refusing to get up. You think you'd like to stay there forever but you couldn't do it.

It was about 6pm Montreal time. Their spring. Our autumn.

Teresa was alone and that was hard to take, it would always be hard to take, but it was important to remember she was not a lonely person. Alone but not lonely. Her children would repeat this to each other. Important to remember all of that, the float plane, the success with Margie, the willed trajectory, the firm idea that she was, up to those last moments, doing more or less what she wanted to do, even when—especially when—she was doing what others wanted her to do. They told each other this when the urge to plant one's face in a cushion for a few hours or bike all day in a southerly or find some other way of—fill in the blanks to approximate negation and despair—got strong. Both your parents are gone now, he found himself repeating to
himself, at first on an hourly basis. He'd never felt more like a child, like her child.

Helena bought him an anthology of poetry about death. For one foolish instant he was staggered. Why not a card which said Cheer Up. Then he began reading the poems. He felt dumb. She was asking for his intelligence to come back. He was aware that he was reading with an unhelpful aggression, directed against the poems themselves. Okay, then, console me, he said to the poems. He began talking to Helena about this.

First thing Stephanie had done when she heard about Teresa was look for cigarettes. She was a non-smoker, always. But suddenly, she said, it was as if she were addicted. Finally she found a cigar. A cigar in her house, the home of three young girls! It was in an office drawer, left by Paul Shawn who smoked birth cigars in semi-ironic fashion, she remembered. She went into the bathroom, sat on the toilet, and lit the thing. There was no irony. One did not shake ironically, that came from the shaken core. She really wanted to make herself sick, to suck the smoke from a visible fire into her body, expelling what she could. Or she just needed to have something to do with her hands and with her mouth. She didn't have a clue what would happen to her if she inhaled.

Hello, her daughter was knocking on the bathroom door. Isabelle was busting. Of course! The child was what you put in your hands, your mouth. Opening the door, the mother kissed her daughter, pressing her lips long and hard against the girl's cheek.

Isabelle necessary, Paddy said to his sister when she told him what had happened. She didn't get it. It was very lame. She smiled anyway. Good old Paddy.

His mother's last text went to Stephanie. But it got held up in some trans-global phone queue, so that in an echo of a supernatural TV show she thought she'd once seen, Steph got the message in New Zealand the day after Teresa had died. Steph had already thrown the cigar into the bowl where it floated. It looked faecal.

Her phone beeped and the name came up: Ma.

With some difficulty she got herself and the two girls who were with her into the car and round to Paddy's where she handed him the phone. She wasn't going to open any message like that. He had to. He was her big brother. They put the TV on for the girls and sat with the phone on the table in front of them. Wait, he told his little sister, let me get my reading glasses. Here they are. The professor is ready. For the first six months or a year, he thought, the wearer always says something to preface the glasses. No one seemed able to bypass this phase. With kids in his clinic he was still doing it. After that you simply put them on. Ta-da, he said. She looked at him in glasses and for a brief moment the urgency of the phone couldn't be felt. Distinguished, she said. Then Paddy pressed the button.

Teresa was replying to Steph's Are you there yet?

And what did it say? They peered together at once. They were head to head, looking, his ear against her hair. They stared at the small screen.

It read Je suis ici.