Somebody Loves Us All (7 page)

Gorzo shrugged. Thank me?

They were still locked together. Paddy’s arm was sore. Tony gave his hand a final raised shake and released them.

He turned back to his car, put the bowling ball into the boot, which Paddy now saw was full of balls, and closed the lid. Maybe he’d forgotten about giving him the ball, or he’d never had that idea really. He’d simply needed a way of holding Paddy’s hand.

‘You think he can go to university in a year or two years?’

It took Paddy a moment to remember that the subject was Jimmy. ‘Why not,’ he said.

‘Think he can be less stupid than his old man?’

‘I think he can.’

He laughed and opened his car door. ‘Hey, Patrick, I won’t call your wife, don’t worry.’ Paddy believed it was the first time he’d used his name.

Paddy watched him get in and start the car. He put it in gear and the car rocked forward slightly. There was a sound from his boot, a clicking as all the heavy bowling balls met and dispersed and met again. Then he realised Paddy was still standing there. ‘What? Need a lift?’ he said. Paddy shook his head and pointed in the direction of his own car and Tony Gorzo drove off.

It would be another three years before Paddy heard his voice again though every Christmas they sent a card. Paddy believed it was Ellie, Gorzo’s wife, who wrote these cards.

The week after Jimmy Gorzo had been released from hospital, Paddy and Bridget had been to a party, mainly of her work friends. He’d thought he might speak to someone there about Jimmy—he was bursting with it, very up—but when he was at the party, somehow the impulse lost its appeal. A type of satisfying selfishness made him cling to the story, not let it out. Suddenly it seemed very personal, as if it vibrated with significance for him only and spilling it now would wreck the meaning somehow. This made him depressed though too. He felt he was at the party under false pretences and that he had nothing at all to say to anyone. He went outside and kicked a tennis ball into the dark.
He heard sounds, and a dog, a golden retriever, came out of the shadows of the lawn and dropped the ball at his feet. He kicked the ball again.

After they’d come home, Bridget said to him, ‘We’re talking to people, having a conversation, and I turn around and you’re perfectly still, paused, what are you doing?’

‘Am I?’ he said. He was drunk.

‘Yes, what are you doing?’

‘Listening?’ he said.

‘For what?’

‘For what’s being said.’

‘I think you’re listening to something else. You’re listening to
how
it’s being said.’ She resented his occupation, felt it gave him a spurious excuse to sit back while she did all the work. This was how she conceived of the social world, as labour. He thought she had a point.

‘What and how,’ he said. ‘They make up speech.’

‘
How?
How is easy. Is she excited, is she mad, is she this or that? You can get that straight away. But you stand there, stunned.’

‘I wasn’t aware of it. I’ll try to be quicker.’

‘And maybe don’t tell people what you do.’ She was sober; she’d driven home, changing gears with an aggressiveness that should have prepared him for this.

‘Really?’

‘Speech therapist. Everyone starts speaking funny.’

‘More correctly?’

‘More something. You may as well say hygiene inspector.’

‘Then what do people do?’ He was fascinated by her, how closely she’d watched him, and this after long periods when they seemed barely to notice what the other was doing. Was this, in the end, what marriage became—harmless ignorance and then a shattering act of intense surveillance?
You? I share my life with
you?
Had she seen him outside with the dog? Of course she was the person whom he’d hoped to tell about Jimmy Gorzo and found himself unable to; it was the same now.

‘They think you’re dirty, unclean. Say you work with kids.’

‘They might think at a kindergarten.’

‘Right,’ she was nodding thoughtfully, ‘that you abuse kids in your care.’

‘They’d think that?’

‘If a man says to me he works at a kindergarten.’

‘He’s automatically a paedophile?’

‘What does he look like?’

‘I don’t know, normal?’

‘Anyway, just talk more, less listening. No one likes a listener.’ She stared at him. ‘I feel you’re doing it again right now.’

‘What?’ he said.

‘Listening.’

How had it happened that he was married to a mad person? He must have been mad too. Finally it had been the dog that had tired of the game with the tennis ball, wandering off across the dark lawn to its kennel and letting out a grand sigh when it settled—an astonishingly human sound, he thought. He and Bridget deserved each other and he wouldn’t find anyone else. Slipping, he searched for the image of himself that Tony Gorzo had proposed in the hospital car park. It appeared and then it was gone. He had gifts and then he didn’t. He looked at his wife. ‘No, no, I promise. I haven’t heard a word you’ve said.’

Here was the issue. He’d discussed it with Lant. We don’t memorise, we memoirise, exactly the sort of word play Bridget couldn’t stomach.

At Sam Covenay’s fourth session they’d tried music. Paddy had asked Sam to bring along whatever he liked. They plugged in Sam’s iPod. For an hour they listened to a sort of thrash, high male voices, lots of guitar solos. Paddy offered the odd comment, leaving spaces for anything Sam might like to say. Paddy was honest. He said when something excited him and when it was awful. ‘Basically,’ he said, ‘I hate falsetto, except maybe in a black soul singer. Al Green, do you know him?’ The session was
the same as the others, a zero return. Not a hair on the boy’s head moved while his favourite stuff belted out and while this sad grasping talking moron said stupid provoking things.

Strictly he should have moved Sam Covenay on after the first month, sooner, towards other realms of assistance. But Sam wouldn’t see anyone else, his mother Angela said. He liked coming to see Paddy. He’s said that to you? he asked her. No, she said, but she could tell. And he was always ready to go. Sometimes he was waiting for her in the car.

Paddy had heard her husband call her ‘angel’. ‘Do you have the car keys, angel? I haven’t got them.’ Automatically it seemed she’d reached across and touched the pocket of his trousers. ‘Okay,’ he said, smiling. ‘I found them.’ Angela and Alan. Paddy had watched their drama with the keys, lasting about four seconds, the first time they came to the room and he thought it exceptionally moving. A sort of nothingness to it that gripped him and rather alarmed him at the same time. To what was he attaching his emotion? He had the thought that these two adults seemed more interesting suddenly than their poor familiar son. Why couldn’t they stay and let the boy sit in the car?

Sam had braces, a chin full of acne. To add to the conspiracy against him, he was fair-skinned and his hair, in this light, had a reddish tinge. Angela herself was apologetically freckled—she wore long-sleeved sweatshirts, shoes even on the warmest days. There were women who wouldn’t show their feet—was she one? Was there a connection here? The mother who won’t display her feet, the son who won’t speak? Paddy made a few aimless notes. He remembered seeing his ex-wife Bridget brushing her hair in the bedroom mirror. She was pulling it back with one hand. He said to her that she should wear it like that. What, she said, and then everyone sees my
ears
?

In a year or so the braces would come off. Sam would grow into his face, his life, as we all did. It was probable that the Covenays were in that small percentage for whom the only action was inaction. This was what Paddy felt when he first met the family—time is a wonderful thing, and patience. He said
as much to them. The Covenays of course felt that time had stopped. They looked harrowed. And, against this judgement, Paddy had taken Sam on. Why? To give the parents hope? That seemed unlikely. He treated his job seriously and wasn’t prepared to indulge anyone, not even that deserving pair. So he must have said yes because he considered himself a god—this was Lant’s suggestion. Yet what if it wasn’t success he wanted, and the operation of those gifts Tony Gorzo liked to grant him, but failure? What did it mean to want something in front of you with which you could do nothing?

Surely this was granting Sam’s display of adolescence in extremis a therapeutic potency it hadn’t and couldn’t earn.

Paddy glanced over at Sam now. He couldn’t see his face, just the hair. They had an unspoken—what else—agreement that Sam could assume whatever position he liked. He could sit on one of the chairs, he could lie on the sofa, he could curl up under the desk. He always went for the same chair, the one closest to the door, in front of the cupboard that contained the games and toys used with the younger kids. He’d tried those too, as a way of explaining his profession to Sam. Here is what I do.

Often Paddy stood and moved around the room, finding books off the shelves, shifting papers. It was tactical—to relieve the target of his surveillance—but it also allowed Paddy to get some work done, some other work, non-Sam work.

He took some more notes for his column on the glottal stop.

Of course Paddy hadn’t let the perversity of taking on the Covenay case prevent him from attempting, rightly, to end it. He wasn’t a complete idiot. After a month, Paddy tells Angela that it’s not working and he has real doubts about it ever working. She’s the one who usually delivers Sam and collects him and now he’s already waiting by the lift, ready to go down. They stand at the doorway, talking softly. But she insists something useful is happening. ‘I feel there’s progress with this,’ she says, her eyes locked onto his.

‘Really?’ Paddy says, experiencing a surge of relief that he doesn’t quite know what to do with. He finds himself looking
at her shoes, which are running shoes, or rather walking shoes on their way to becoming some sort of sports footwear. They are lime green, with darker green laces. They transmit a kind of health. Angela walks on her toes, he’s noticed, rocking forward slightly. Has this given her feet a bunched look that she wishes to conceal? She likes to stand close when she talks to you. So you can’t see her feet? She’s told Paddy she works part-time at a dry-cleaners owned by her brother and he imagines there’s a faint chemical whiff when she enters the apartment. She’s wearing a pale blue zip-up Icebreaker top and black stretch pants. She could be on her way from or to the gym or Pilates. He can’t inhale because suddenly he thinks this would tell her he was trying to smell her. There’s a brightness to her that seems ready to turn into exhaustion.

‘I think so.’ She pats his arm, rests her fingers on his shirtsleeve. Her hand is hot. She blushes. Her blood is running all over the place.

They both understand she’s merely expressing a hope. She’s not the person in charge. What can she know? Yet he’s genuinely grateful. ‘Thank you,’ he says, almost adding ‘angel’—does he swallow it in time? Sam is holding the lift open for her, one arm reaching inside it as though—okay, as though he’s about to enter a large metal mouth. Back in his office, Paddy adds this to his notes. A lot of what he writes seems fictional, not just in terms of the made-upness but also in terms of images.

Paddy couldn’t hear the voice through the wall any more. Yet he was sure his mother hadn’t left her apartment; the doors made a distinct rubbery sucking sound when they closed, a little like the door on a new fridge. It was one of the quirks of the building that this sound penetrated. There were five other apartments on their floor. With dedication, one could learn a good deal about everyone’s comings and goings. They knew the architect couple, the Harleys, who lived two along, went for walks in the city at the same time every night: eight thirty. They’d met them once,
leaving on such an excursion. The Harleys said they liked to examine buildings reacting to night-light, the moon, the stars, the streetlights. The light from humans, Rebecca Harley said. What light? said Helena. The Harleys looked at each other as if it was a very basic question indeed. Then Geoff Harley, by way of a demonstration, held up his wrist and pushed a button on his watch, illuminating the dial briefly. Okay, said Helena. Rebecca Harley meanwhile had her mobile phone out. She held this up to their faces. Watches and phones, said Paddy, they have an effect on city architecture? It’s a micro interaction, Geoff Harley said.

At one session, in search of a subject, Paddy had told Sam about the Harleys.

This he didn’t tell: On Thursdays Geoff went out alone, a bit later, towards nine. Helena and Paddy had played a game. Where does Geoff Harley go on Thursdays without his wife? To examine buildings some more? Humans? What micro interaction was transpiring? One rule was it couldn’t be sexual, that was too obvious. The Harleys already seemed a little wife-swappy, with their slightly creepy routine, their matching dark clothes. Their plastic poster cylinders under their arms. Paddy and Helena had soon created such a stockpile of stories about Geoff and his secret life that it was hard to meet his eye when they bumped into him. His smallest gesture seemed to confirm some detail they’d invented. The way he touched his shirt cuffs when he spoke. His smirk. The bag he carried. They had to stop. But they could still hear him if they tried every Thursday.

Before he started seeing Sam, Paddy set up his usual family meeting, so that everyone knew what was involved. He told them that he was all for speech but that speech took many forms and that elocution was not his business. Amazing how frequently the fathers made a joke about
electrocution
at that point. One in three, Paddy thought. ‘No putting his finger in the plug socket then?’

Alan Covenay was not among this number. He’d listened carefully to what Paddy had to say. Towards the end, he’d stood up and patted his pockets, asked his wife about the car keys. The slight mournfulness he carried may have had nothing to do with Sam. In tall men who were drawn to cultural things Paddy had often noticed this air of melancholy, a feeling perhaps that the realm naturally favoured compactness. They didn’t quite fit in their seats. You saw these stooping, guilty figures at the theatre, in galleries, at the orchestra where puckish men skipped around them. Then on his way out Alan Covenay stood in front of the framed cartoon that hung in the office. ‘It’s dropped slightly in the top left corner,’ he said. Paddy stood beside him, looking. He was two inches taller than Paddy. Paddy hadn’t noticed it but he was right about the picture. Inside the frame, the print hung crookedly now. ‘I can fix that for you if you like.’