Somebody Loves Us All (6 page)

He asked Paddy questions about his job and what he was trying with Jimmy but didn’t seem able to take in the answers. Sometimes he got Paddy confused with the Ear, Nose and Throat surgeon, or Jimmy’s neurologist, and once with the hospital dietician. He said, ‘You specialise in back injuries?’ No, Paddy started explaining about the range of people he saw on a daily basis. Stroke patients, Alzheimer’s, cancer patients, Parkinson’s, multiple sclerosis, coronary bypasses. He could see Gorzo start to tune out, actually flinching. ‘People with dysphagia,’ said Paddy.

‘What is
that
?’ said Gorzo, momentarily catching the word, and finding offensive what he didn’t know.

‘Swallowing, difficulty with swallowing.’

‘Oh Jesus, don’t tell me about it. Can’t swallow? Take me out and shoot me, please.’

‘No, you get cancer of the neck—’

‘Oh fuck.’

‘—we can help you regain normal function.’

He was already moving away, waving a finger: don’t, just don’t.

Gorzo would speak to his son’s doctors while answering calls on his large mobile phone. He was one of the first users of the phones. It was always gripped in one fist. He’d thrust it at anyone passing and say, ‘Call someone. Help yourself.’ The phone was always running out of battery power. Ellie carried around the adaptor for it in her handbag—this was her task—though one time she forgot and Tony sulked in the corner of the room, staring at the dead apparatus. He needed to feel constantly aggrieved; the phone was a useful tool in his torment. Routinely he got lost in the hospital and would question nurses about why they kept moving his son around. When he was told that his son had been in the same room for a month, he wouldn’t believe it.

His wife, Paddy noticed, also tried to avoid Tony Gorzo. Ellie and Paddy often met coming and going from Jimmy’s room, slipping away furtively.

‘I won’t tell if you won’t,’ said Paddy.

She smiled weakly at him, thanking him for all his help.

It was a mystery how she coped but he’d quickly seen that she had the sort of reserves of self-possession required in that family, loyalty too. She refused to condemn her husband. She told Paddy that Tony was trying very hard. ‘Jimmy is everything to him,’ she said. ‘He would take his place in an instant.’

Paddy had heard the same thing from Gorzo, and more than once. ‘But Ellie, he can’t take his place. That’s the one thing he can’t do. It’s very important that we all focus on the things we
can
do for Jimmy.’

She nodded and took her handkerchief out of her bag, touching it to her eyes. Weepy, certainly, but she was still the person Tony didn’t try to whack.

Jimmy Gorzo, it turned out, was intelligent, willing and resourceful. A quick study. Paddy’s job was also made easier once the boy’s hearing began to improve, which happened rapidly. An audiologist had fitted hearing aids but after a couple of weeks
Jimmy began to complain of distortion so they removed them. He also said that he didn’t like the silence of the hospital room; he thought he heard better when there was a certain amount of noise. There was something counter-intuitive in this—didn’t the deaf get distracted by background noises?—but Paddy talked to the audiologist about it and there was recent research which gave support to Jimmy’s feeling. When things happened in a hush, Jimmy said he felt a dullness creep through his brain. ‘I find it easy to give up.’ They put a cassette-radio beside his bed, which stayed on more or less permanently. The doctors and nurses were encouraged to talk to their patient over the noise of the machine. No one was supposed to shout. Paddy’s work with Jimmy also happened in the context of this acoustically boosted environment. Here were the beginnings of their conference paper.

Unsurprisingly, it was only Tony Gorzo who objected to the cassette-radio; he’d turn it off when he was with Jimmy. He said he couldn’t hear himself think.

One day Paddy came across Ellie in front of the hospital. She was helping an elderly white-haired woman down the front steps. The woman, dressed entirely in black, walked with a cane and was bent over. She moved her legs by swinging them outwards as though they were weights only vaguely connected with her. Each step was followed by a pause, a regrouping. She was seriously incapacitated but also immensely sturdy. Her wide hips revolved with power and her shoulders were rounded and strong. If she fell, it would be serious, though at the same time she didn’t appear fragile. On her face was a look of utter disgust. He knew at once this was Tony Gorzo’s mother.

He waited until they were on the footpath before approaching them. Ellie was smiling apologetically. When he said hello, she dipped her head and performed a little step that was almost in the nature of a curtsy. There was a reverence he couldn’t shift and they shook hands at an odd distance; he had to reach to find
hers as she reversed, catching her fingers only. ‘This is Jimmy’s grandmother,’ she said softly. He recalled the ban, the secretive aspect of visiting the patient.

The old woman stood with her feet set wide, looking from Ellie to him.

‘Paddy Thompson,’ he said. ‘Pleased to meet you.’ Her right hand stayed on her walking stick but with her left she gave his hand a light squeeze, studying his face. Her expression was one of wariness. She knew him to be a medical person. ‘Have you been to see him?’ he said.

Ellie nodded quickly. She spoke to the old woman in what he understood to be Greek, explaining something about him. The woman uttered a word; she hadn’t got it: who was he exactly? Ellie said more, pointing at Paddy. Suddenly the woman’s face changed and she looked at him, beaming. Her mouth opened but nothing came out. He saw her lower set of false teeth rise slightly with the pressure from her tongue. She held her left hand in front of her, searching for his hand again, which he gave. He felt her grip, and she leaned forward, putting some weight on him. Actually there was little weight to take; that impression of girth and force may have been an illusion created by the full black skirt, the manner of walking. Standing close, Gorzo’s mother was tiny, an ancient figure from another land, a real peasant, her face fantastically lined.

She was nodding and smiling, quite overcome it seemed. He saw through her fine hair to the scalp. Her eyes were red and moist.

‘She’s very happy,’ said Ellie.

‘Happy,’ the old woman said, or something like it, moving their hands up and down. A tear rolled across her cheek.

‘Me too,’ said Paddy. He laughed and Mrs Gorzo laughed, Ellie too.

They were happy because of Jimmy’s improving situation. Successive scans showed activity in his auditory cortex was returning to normal. The cochlea damage had been temporary, though it was also clear that Jimmy’s problems weren’t wholly
to do with hearing. Although his comprehension appeared unhindered, after a few weeks he was still having difficulty articulating certain sounds and there were memory problems. The neurologist thought Jimmy might have sustained minor frontal lobe damage in his fall, though the grooves in Broca’s looked ordinary enough.

Nevertheless his overall progress was exceptional. When the orderly came to clear his meal tray, he said, ‘Can I have some more please, please.’ In fact he wanted more peas, but this was a massive advance on Day One’s bleak moans. His voice lacked the full inflective range but he could modulate volume and pitch fairly well now and there was a realistic hope that over time he would regain complete control. He was also not deploying his hands as much to indicate things, although this compensatory tool would continue to appear even long past its obvious usefulness.

Paddy wasn’t sure how Tony Gorzo would take his son’s achievements. It wasn’t perfection after all, nowhere near. Jimmy’s voice still had a pronounced tonelessness, especially when he was tired, and there were gaps in his vocabulary. Cunningly, Paddy thought, the boy had developed a strategy for masking these gaps by pausing in speech and inviting the other person to fill in the blanks as if he hadn’t so much lost the word but was passing over it since he had more important things to say. ‘Last night I think I had too many …’ ‘Blankets?’ ‘I had too many on so I threw them off. Sorry if they got dirty on the floor, the blankets.’ Paddy had watched him do this with nurses and it was very convincing. But would Tony think it sufficient?

Paddy got his answer in the week of Jimmy’s discharge, in the hospital car park. Paddy saw him first. Tony Gorzo was bent over, moving things around in the boot of his car. He recognised at once his beefy back, the weight-lifter slant of his shoulders. In a flash he imagined him pushing further into the boot, settling the load on himself and lifting the car above his head to shake it. Paddy’s car was parked just beyond his and for a moment he considered walking away, returning to the spot when Tony had
gone. At that point Gorzo looked around and saw Paddy, or saw someone. He was trying to work out whether they knew each other. Here was another opportunity for Paddy to turn quickly away and move off between the cars. Gorzo was peering. Paddy stepped forward a few feet. Then finally Gorzo lifted one hand in uncertain greeting. Something was attached to the hand, but in the dusk Paddy couldn’t make it out. As he got nearer he saw that Gorzo carried a bowling ball.

Paddy forgot in that instant that Gorzo owned a bowling alley. He only thought that for a man of this sort of pugnacity and ill will, the bowling-ball fist in a darkening hospital car park was terrible and perfect. In one of the lighted windows in the building behind them, his poor son had lain strapped and broken for weeks talking gibberish. Paddy associated acts of sudden and strange violence with this obtuse figure. He would use anything in reach to show the world his dumb muscle, and to cover the great deficiencies of his dumb mind. How could he not know me, Paddy thought, even after weeks?

‘What size is your hand?’ Gorzo said to him.

‘Sorry?’ he said.

Gorzo pulled his fingers from the ball and cradled it on his arm. Then he held his hand up in the air between them. Paddy didn’t understand what he was doing. He nodded at Paddy’s hand. ‘Hold it up.’

‘Hold up my hand?’

‘Put it there.’

Slowly Paddy raised his hand, keeping it a few inches from the other man’s.

He pushed his hand against Paddy’s and kept it there. There was an unexpected smoothness to Tony Gorzo’s skin. Gorzo was looking at how their hands matched. They were close in size—was this a surprise to him? He was judging something. Was it the prologue to some horrible trick? He’d drop the ball on Paddy’s foot. Punch him in the ribs pretending it was a joke. Then it came to him: he was measuring Paddy for a ball. He was going to give him his own bowling ball right there in the
car park. Nothing was beyond him. He wanted to show his gratitude.

They stayed in this position for long seconds, several feet apart but joined at the hand, though now Paddy noticed Tony had stopped looking and judging. His head was slightly bowed. He recalled Gorzo’s mother’s hair and the way she’d held on to him by the hospital steps. Paddy was looking at the top of his skull.

Then Paddy felt Gorzo’s fingers move down between his own, and his responding, as they must. That was an eerie sensation, as of being swallowed bodily though the only contact was through the fingers. They clasped hands tightly and Gorzo looked at him, shaking his head. There was a slight trembling in the other man’s fingers, as if he were just managing to restrain himself from something.

‘You have children?’ he said.

‘No,’ said Paddy.

‘Wife?’

‘Yes.’

‘What’s her name?’

‘Bridget.’

‘I want to call her.’

‘Call my wife?’

‘I want to say does she know who she’s married to? Is she aware?’

‘Okay.’

‘Is she aware of the gifts of this man?’

‘Of me? My gifts?’

‘I can’t believe you don’t have kids.’

‘I have my patients.’

He dismissed this with a snort. ‘If I don’t have Jimmy, all I’d do I’d get drunk. At the lanes, I have a bar. I’d sit in my bar all night. What do you do at night?’

‘Me?’ Paddy glanced around at the car park, the windows of the hospital buildings. Was he suggesting they become drinking buddies? No, the question was more than that. He was briefly
overwhelmed. But by what? Then he had an odd moment. The many-windowed structure seemed capable of crushing the two men, rolling over like a child’s block and catching them underneath, as though they were toy people themselves. He felt their deep insignificance. Steam was rising from the nearby laundry building, rinsing the air in the smell and taste of hospital linen. They were like that steam, shots of vapour disappearing in the night sky. Paddy had once come across a hospital room almost entirely filled with old pillows. He saw the room again now in a painful moment.

He liked what he did. He made a difference in his patients’ lives. Had this idiot made him reflective, doubtful? No, my work is not in question, surely, he thought. But soon I’ll be home. Bridget won’t be there for a while. I’ll have the place to myself. With a sort of terror he recognised this as his favourite time, when he could do whatever he liked, even if it were only to drink a cup of tea and sit absently in a chair, his book beside him, some music on. Gorzo hadn’t made him see it, only admit it, and he wasn’t sure what he’d seen anyway. The hot feeling of calamity, uselessness, waste, left him with cleansing speed. This was the true vapour, to give in, that was the nothing to be avoided. Jimmy Gorzo hadn’t given in, and nor had his father. ‘What do I do at night?’ said Paddy, revived, grateful himself now, ‘Nothing much, you know. I bestow my gifts.’

Tony looked at him carefully and for the first time Paddy saw something other than aggression and grievance. He smiled but he seemed unconvinced, disappointed, as if he’d hoped for something more from the man who’d saved his son. They’d come all this way and he’d paid the tribute, and Paddy had done little more than deflect him. What was this realm in which a man couldn’t take praise? Who was this medical jerk in front of him? So skilled, so hopeless.

‘Thank you,’ said Paddy, seeing all this and wanting to make amends. Because he did feel he owed Gorzo something—strangely it was true.