Somebody Loves Us All (9 page)

At the end of the corridor Sam was gone. Paddy looked at the door to his mother’s apartment for a few moments, thinking he should check. Just knock and say hello. That was allowed by the rules surely. Then there was a noise. The door was opening. Medbh stepped out. Our girl.

‘Hello, Paddy,’ she said, ‘what are you doing lurking in the corridor?’

It was Medbh’s first day at his mother’s. Now she was coming to cook for them. It had been Medbh he’d been listening to; his
mother had been talking to Medbh. He’d forgotten. ‘I was just seeing off Sam, one of my people.’

‘The boy who doesn’t speak?’

‘Well, okay,’ he said.

‘And by the look on your face, I’m not supposed to know that, am I? How do I know that?’

‘How do you know that, Medbh?’

‘Well, I don’t know the kid’s last name.’

‘Thank God for confidentiality.’

She walked over to him. ‘Moving right along, I’d like to cook eggplant parmigiana for you, Paddy. And also, time allowing, a beef and beer casserole. Is that too wintry? It doesn’t feel much like spring anyway. Helena was going to leave out the recipe. Promise I won’t ask whether there was any progress on the case which I know very little about involving a person who recently left the building.’

‘Promise I won’t express relief at being able to experience finally the give and take of normal conversation.’

He let her in the apartment.

‘Nice bike,’ she said.

Lundi. Teresa looked out the window. She’d woken at the proper time. The radio was on. No more about the truck drivers. They’d made their snail. Oil prices stayed up but were predicted to fall. The apartment building wasn’t moving, the windows were soundless, though she could see down at street level an advertising sign billowing, the giant picture of a car inflating and deflating. She asked her tumour what the word for wind was: vent. The vent blew and blew. Le vent souffle aujourd’hui. She tossed the dictionary back in the drawer.

In the shower she spoke English aloud and it came back to her as something else, as if she was being translated on the radio—she heard two parts.

At the computer she felt a sharp loss. She was missing Cushion, her game. Cleopatra. But she’d lose. In her current distracted state, clever people, and even the not-so-clever, would take advantage of her. Her empire would be endangered by obscene inhabitants of Belgrade and she’d be wiped out.

Self-disgust almost made her rush out of the apartment at that moment. What was she hiding from? What was the point?

Standing near the front door, she heard Helena leaving for work and a little later someone arriving at the apartment. This would be Paddy’s first patient. She waited a few minutes until she was sure he would have turned off his phone and then she sent him a text. She explained about missing the weekend with Steph. The
bug had gone on and on. She was a lot better now but would lie low for a while longer. Love to H. Review this week? Good luck, knock ’em dead. It was two texts.

Her mobile bleeped. Steph again. Teresa had already replied to the first volley of messages. The Wairarapa had been good, not as good as it could have been with you know who, but good. Girls fine, tired. Sleeps today. Last night a late one.

She sent a quick one back. Kisses to my sweet puddings! Too soon to come. Will call later. Sleep angels. You too.

Desk. Cup. Keys. Coat-hanger. Goat hanger? Gert? She was back in Moore Wilson’s. Carpet. Electric jug. She walked around the apartment touching each object as she named it aloud. Paper towels. Photograph. Ironing board. Ironing board. She was touching this last thing with her toe but she reached under the bed and pulled it out, set it up, and then tried. Ironing board, she said. It would not come. You, she said to the ironing board, I hate.

Pillow. Moisturiser. Sleep. She couldn’t touch sleep of course but she sounded wonderful saying it. Sleep. As if summoning it, or being summoned by it, she lay down fully dressed on her bed and closed her eyes. Why was she so tired? Because her body was fighting it.

She opened and closed her mouth, moved her tongue around. She thought of the children Paddy dealt with in his work. They got delivered to his door. Was it a door she should knock on and ask for help with her speech? It struck her in a confused instant that somehow they’d brought this on, Paddy and Helena. They’d persuaded her to move into their building, to sell up and come into town, to enter her dwelling by means of a lift. Look at the life you’ll have in the city. What’s the point of staying on in that big house, of living on in Lower Hutt? Which weren’t their words, she knew it.

This was accurate enough: they’d advised her to sell lots of things since where else would it go. The framed maps that had
been Brendan’s passionate hobby as a boy, then as an adult, his rather canny interest since it turned out there were collectors desperate for the stuff. Gone. Okay, you needed a good deal of wall space. Plus it was Paddy’s line, that longitude described what it felt like to look at a map, and to be honest she’d not spent much time gazing on them over the years. Still they were there, or had been and they showed an aspect of her existence; they were maps of that much.

Wasn’t it something that two of the maps remained in the family, sent to Margaret’s boys in Vancouver since they happened to show parts of Canada? She’d received no acknowledgement of that consignment, and did not expect it. Oh Margie. If she watched her children as audience, let her have this right, to also dislike some parts of the show.

A man had come from an antiquarian bookshop in Wellington and given her an appraisal on the maps, also quoting on some books Paddy had selected for chucking. She’d trusted Paddy utterly in this, not even bothering to look in the boxes, though now she felt she should have, if only as a tribute to the person who’d thought them at one stage necessary to their life together.

Her children were older now than their father had ever been.

The man from the shop was attractively weary, dejected even, as he moved through the rooms. In his grave attention, he seemed to be giving the objects in her house the sadness they deserved, and she had to excuse herself once to get a glass of water. She’d explained the situation exactly, that it was a great excitement to leave, despite which he persisted in his little grieving manner, stooped and tentative. It was as if he didn’t believe her and that leaving was always wrong. She noticed his shirt, one button undone, had come loose over his belt. Extremely crooked teeth that somehow suggested gentleness. He carried a catalogue and referred to it from time to time, making small notes with a pencil. At the end, he passed Teresa a piece of paper with a sum written on it. She didn’t really know whether it was more or less
than she was expecting though the amount was considerable. ‘Good pieces,’ he said in a murmur. Really he was condemning her actions.

‘Thank you,’ she said, again moved and feeling it was all a mistake, or feeling the temptation to renounce what was done. At some point though, ten, twenty years after Brendan, she’d begun to stop considering herself widowed. That was a surprise. And what was she? Something unnamed. No, this antiquarian man didn’t know her at all.

Before this, Helena and Paddy had arrived for a big clean-up session. The result was her house had been chastened. They’d filled their car with boxes of stuff to take to the St Vincent de Paul. These were the things no one would want, he said.

‘Except the poor and the desperate,’ she said.

‘No,’ Paddy told her. ‘Walk into those places now, it’s the middle class you’re fighting with over bargain furniture and vintage clothes. The poor and the desperate shop elsewhere for new.’

Paddy also arranged the sale of the printing press, which had sat idle for decades in the garage, and on which their father made them birthday cards they weren’t allowed to touch with dirty fingers. Brendan had known he shouldn’t have acted with such preciousness in this area but it was the only such area, which drove him mad all the more. In everything else he was carefree, indulgent, irresponsible even. She had to be the disciplinarian, at which she had little talent. Love, he wanted, love all the time, and the ceaseless generation of happiness. In this way, she thought she was more grown-up than he was—and he agreed. ‘You’re the wise one,’ he told her. ‘The sensible one.’ Dying young, however, was a sort of vindication of his way.

Somewhere there was a box of these cards. She insisted to Paddy that each of the children be given a metal mould as keepsake. She was not breaking up any sets by doing this since these were novelty items collected more for fun than anything else. They were the symbols Brendan often used for the children, on gifts. Stephanie got a duck, Paddy a man in a hat, and she
put aside a sun for Margie. She thought that when her oldest daughter got around to complaining about the heedless dispersal of precious family things, the lack of consultation, she would present her with this sun. The risk was that Margie would see it as satirical, a sly commentary on her nature, but this was always the risk and on balance it was better to be suspected of mild offence than to appear to have neglected her altogether.

Of course it was ridiculous to blame Paddy and Helena for her current state or to even think that the move had happened against her will. She’d wanted it and badly, it turned out. The great luck of the next-door apartment coming up for sale! She’d had to lie down briefly on her first afternoon there from happiness and shock. Where was everything? The maps. No one was to blame. This was the tumour telling her things that weren’t true about the world. Like the old maps. They were wrong. Whole landmasses were in the wrong place.

Someone was ringing the bell. She sat up at once. If she were quiet, they’d go away. It wasn’t time yet to share her tumour with anyone. That would happen, of course it would. She saw it all. She almost wept then in a gushing pity for herself and for the faces that came to her with utter distinctiveness, the faces of her children and their children, watching her. Her bearing under these gazes would count for everything and she had not yet found the mode for it, for telling another living person she was not going to be one of them for much longer. She did not feel at all solid. They wouldn’t recognise her. She didn’t believe in God. Why not? Because there was too much suffering. But now, as a sufferer, she felt aggrieved at being banished from God’s sight, at doing the banishing.

The bell rang again, longer this time.

She stood up carefully and crept towards it. At this point someone put a key in the lock, the door opened and a girl stepped inside. Was this a drug person, finally come?

‘Oh! God, I’m so sorry! You are here. Sorry! I was ringing
and I thought you were out. I’m Medbh.’ She was holding out her hand, smiling. ‘Hello Mrs Thompson.’

But she was too attractive, too nice. Teresa took the girl’s hand. ‘Is it cold outside?’ she said.

‘Sorry?’

‘Cold?’

‘Oh, it’s not bad. I’m just set cold, that’s all. It’s my temperature.’ She was taking off her coat. ‘So you just point me in the right direction. If it’s okay with you, Mrs Thompson, I’ll cook first, clean after. It’s very nice to meet you. Is it okay to come now? It’s all right, yes?’

‘Yes. I’m …’ she found it, the thing she had to say, ‘Thérèse.’ It was the tumour’s name.

The girl studied her for a moment. ‘Hi!’

Then she was following the girl into the kitchen. ‘Tell me some of your favourites. What do you like to eat?’ The girl was opening the fridge and looking in, pulling out the vegetable drawers. She held up the bag of sausages and felt them through the plastic.

Teresa nodded. Yes, those need to be used.

‘I can do that.’

The girl wouldn’t let her go. There was a string of rapid-fire questions about where things were, which Teresa answered by opening drawers, by pointing. There. Finally she crept from the room. She went to the computer and sent Pip a Skype message: Grass is a great evil. I must visit your wonderful city and educate you in our ways. We must mow together. When can I come?

He was watching Medbh slice and mince garlic. She chopped an onion. Paddy had offered to help but she’d turned him down. In her hands their knives seemed sharper, more professional. He remembered his time as a hotel worker. One night he was in a party that superglued a spatula to Chef’s hat.

He’d known a Medbh in high school, an exchange student from Dublin, and not one since. Paddy had sat next to her on a school outing and said, ‘Tell me, Medbh, about Van Morrison.’

‘Who?’ she said. ‘Well I hate his music.’ He remembered she always wore lace-up boots that went halfway up her shins. She had a white pair and a red pair. In class she was constantly reaching down to lace them up or unlace them. It exasperated the teachers. The leather was so thin you could see the knobs of her ankles. Obviously she was lying to him. How could anyone not think
Astral Weeks
a masterpiece? But then again, obviously he was lying in pretending to be interested in her opinion, at least about music.

‘Tell me about Thin Lizzy then,’ he said.

‘Who?’ she said.

‘Thin Lizzy. “The Boys are Back in Town”, you know. They’re Irish. Two of the original members actually played in Them, with Van.’

‘There you go, you know it all, why’d you need me for.’

Why’d you need me for
. For some reason the phrase had stuck in Paddy’s mind and he’d made it his goodbye statement at clinic when his client—boy or girl—walked out of the last
session feeling, if not completely better, then better by far. And they did. Mostly, mainly, they did feel better, in their mouths, in their minds. Sometimes Paddy got a high five, though he was careful never to initiate. It was speech therapy. But no one made a speech, that was forbidden.

‘You’re a surprisingly good cook for someone involved in the lower reaches of the splatter movie business,’ he said to this current Medbh.

They’d come by Medbh through Dora. Dora and Medbh had been friends from university, were now partners, lovers, artists together. They’d made several short films in which young women, usually played by Medbh and Dora themselves, suffered gory ends while hitchhiking around New Zealand. Helena had given them a series of long-term, interest-free loans. One of the films had been shown at a queer film festival in Sydney, where Dora’s father now lived. The film received a Commended in the Cultural Understanding section of the jury awards. He remembered the day Dora had brought the certificate around to the apartment, tossing it Frisbee-style at her mother. ‘That,’ said Dora, ‘is what you get for a thousand hours of work.’

Helena held the certificate in her hands, her eyes growing moist. ‘Look at this. Look at this.’ Dora might have been seven years old fresh from her first ballet recital.

Dora sniffed. ‘A piece of paper, a pat on the head.’

‘But a pat on the head from important people,’ said Helena.

‘Self-important people.’

‘Congratulations,’ said Paddy.

‘Right,’ she said.

She always rumbled him, even when he was being sincere, which in this instance he wasn’t. He kept it light: ‘Does this mean investors can expect a return?’

Dora gave Paddy a look: who are you again?

Helena flourished the certificate again, waving it to bat away any negativity, and moved to her daughter and kissed her on the cheek.

Then Dora had told her mother not to bend the certificate
and had taken it from her. Oh it mattered. There followed bubbles, not inexpensive either. The seven-year-old took three glasses thank you very much.

In the kitchen, Medbh told Paddy, ‘We don’t call it splatter. Other people have labels. Horror. Gore. Sicko. We just make films.’

‘Films in which the female leads are routinely eviscerated and left to die by the roadside. And in which the flagrant disregard for continuity is built into the aesthetic, as is the use of strings of sausages for the victims’ intestines.’

‘I see you’re a fan, Paddy.’

‘I liked your early work.’

‘
Muff Must Die
?’

‘Was that the one? Anyway, your recent turn to a more political cinema raises questions for me which seem problematic.’

‘
Hitch-Dykes
?’

‘I’m no good with titles. In this one the two women overcome their assailant and it’s
his
sausages we see spilled. Quite a reversal, don’t you think?’

Medbh was the fun one in the couple. This was Helena’s own appraisal. She said she hated to admit it but her daughter had chosen to be the difficult one, the moody one, the hostile one. Dora needed Medbh. They all needed Medbh. She finished an onion and when she released her fingers it fell into a million pieces.

‘You’re over-reading us, Paddy. We were just sick of getting that stuff on our clothes, in our hair, everywhere,’ she said. ‘Plus we had a wedding to go to the next day. You shower and shower and it still smells. It was the bloke’s idea. Kill me, he said, why not kill me?’

‘My God it’s a pragmatic art form, isn’t it.’

‘Filmmaking is ninety per cent weather. Scorsese said that.’

‘He’s had some pretty good weather throughout his career.’

She gave a short laugh. The slices of salted eggplant were laid out and sweating on a tray. She bent her head close to the tray, inspecting.

‘What are you doing?’ he said.

‘The moisture that pops out, why can’t we ever see it happen? I mean, they’re not exactly small drops, are they.’ She stood up again. ‘The truth is, Patrick, Dora and I are a bit tired of our cinematic direction.’

‘You’ve hitchhiked all over New Zealand. You’ve had your throats slit from Kaitaia to Bluff.’

‘
Bluff Muff Must Die
,’ Medbh said sadly. ‘That would have been a good title.’

‘All that disembowelling, all those sausages.’

She peered into the oven. ‘We’re interested in doing something without talking, no dialogue.’

‘I liked your dialogue. “When will we get there?” “Soon, doll.” “What’s this dirt track? This isn’t the way to Auckland.” “It’s a shortcut.”’

‘We’re interested in silence.’

‘Silent movies. Of course that’s been done. But how would the women tell the men who pick them up where they’re heading? Would they use sign language? Deaf women getting murdered?’

‘No more hitch dykes.’

‘Big change.’

‘Actually it’s how we got to know about Sam, the boy who doesn’t talk. We were with Helena the other week and telling her about our idea.’

‘The idea of silence.’

‘Right. So it came up then. I guess we were brainstorming. Dora said, Most of our time in real life is spent
not
talking. We sit at a desk, we chop an onion, we walk home.’

‘You’re chopping an onion
and
talking.’

‘Because you’re here. By myself, I wouldn’t. I won’t be saying much on the way home either. I’ll sit on the bus, not saying anything. I’ll look at all the people on the bus and on the streets, not speaking.’

‘Except on their mobile phones.’

‘Would you please be quiet?’

‘I’ll be silent.’

‘But go to a film and you hear all this talk. Why is that? So then Helena must have mentioned this person you’re seeing. Dora thought it was really interesting. Sam became something of a hero, an example anyway.’

‘You know you’re in danger of stepping on my toes here. If we’re talking about Sam, and we’re not because that’s patient confidentiality but a case such as Sam’s, a theoretical boy called theoretically Sam, if he’s the subject, I kind of
want
that Sam to talk and so do his parents and his teachers and the world. And so does he.’

‘You know that for sure? That Sam, theoretical Sam, wants to?’

‘I know he’s not happy currently.’

‘Talking will bring him happiness?’

‘Talking is something he used to enjoy—I know that, I’ve seen that. The family gave me videos, photos. For some reason he doesn’t do it any more. I think that’s worth finding out about.’

‘Silence is worth finding out about, yes!’

‘But Sam’s no monk with a vow. You don’t look into his eyes and see pools of contentment, the unsayable mysteries of the universe. He won’t let you look in his eyes. He’s too frightened. A hero? I banged my hands on the desk this morning and he jumped out of his skin. And that was private information. Not to be repeated.’

‘Of course.’ Medbh gazed at him.

‘It’s not an approved treatment method, banging the desk,’ he said. ‘Probably I was a bit frustrated.’ Already he’d said too much.

Medbh was also the beautiful one. Dark hair, alert eyes behind her fringe, a graceful poise in her limbs. He’d seen her die a few times. Dora—fair, somewhat bland and open in her face, solid-bodied, all attributes of her father—loved killing her. Medbh had an astonishingly even temperament. As such, she was lousy at being mutilated. She seemed to lie back and take it with complete equanimity. The man came at her with an axe or a spade or a weed eater—whatever he had in the back of
his ute—and she looked as if she’d been promised a massage. She screamed a bit but her eyes were basically welcoming. That feels good, now lower, that’s it. Her accession to the indecencies she suffered on-screen presented, Paddy supposed, exactly the difficult subtext required by a certain sector of viewers. He knew from Dora, however, that this was simply a result of a failure in the performance. Medbh was too good-natured for the role. In the outtakes—they’d had evenings of outtakes at the apartment—they could hear Dora, directing, asking for more horror, more fear, more pain. Sometimes Medbh laughed audibly when she was stabbed.

‘God, you have a great job, Patrick,’ she said. She appeared utterly sincere. ‘Helena told us you were like one of the top speech people for kids.’

‘Well, we don’t get ranked. There’s not a league table where we go head to head against one another.’

‘No but you make a difference. You get them to talk, these difficult cases.’

‘I’m not a child-whisperer,’ he said. ‘The kids I see don’t hear me and just agree. Look at Sam. Plus I like silence too. Don’t get me wrong. It has its place.’

‘When do you like it?’

The question took him by surprise. This was a quality both Medbh and Dora had, a directness, a sheen of self-possession and confidence in the presence of people older than themselves. A conviction that they would and should be taken seriously. This was new, he thought. For his generation the idea was
not
to be taken seriously by anyone. ‘When? I don’t know. Watching a sunset. That for me is a silent moment. You don’t need talk to complete it, right? You sit there with your mouth open.’

‘What else?’

‘Fishing.’

‘Fishing?’

‘Fishing on a still lake.’ There were real memories tied up here though he hadn’t been fishing for years. They’d had a holiday at Taupo. His father had taken him and Margie out one evening in
the little boat; Steph would have been a baby. ‘That’s silence like a held breath, isn’t it.’

‘Until you catch something, then all hell breaks loose. I fished with my uncles in the Sounds.’

‘But I never make the mistake of catching anything.’

On Lake Taupo they’d fished for an hour or more, he and Margie, while their father trailed his hand in the water and baited their hooks. Between baitings, their father closed his eyes. It was intensely quiet and the hush and the sight of him with his eyes closed encouraged them reluctantly to give up speech, to listen to the water lapping against the side of the boat and the birds lifting out of trees by the shore. They got bites and when they pulled in their lines the bait was always gone. The nibbles kept them interested, and the exotic peacefulness of the lake almost persuaded them of the value of this moment. They had an inkling of adult melancholy that was not wholly repellent, he thought. Even Margie was prepared to tolerate it for a time.

But there was something wrong with their father’s method of baiting the hooks, perhaps even a deliberate incompetence. Should they actually catch a fish, this atmosphere would be spoiled. There would be a life in the boat that needed to be ended and suddenly he couldn’t imagine his father having a part in that.

Paddy grew desperate to do the hooks himself but he couldn’t bring himself to ask. Margie too had begun to suffer. In the car driving to the lake, they’d already argued about the best place to stick the knife in a flapping fish, and where exactly was the brain? What right had their father to impose himself so languidly on their needs? They swapped looks: you say it! Yet they continued to bob up and down in the stillness.

At a certain point Paddy saw Margie quietly lift her line out; the hook was bare again. Instead of reeling in and moving the hook over to their father, rousing him with a few drops of water falling from the line on to his arm, she let the sinker drop soundlessly back into the lake.

His sister sat in dumb fury, turned away from Paddy, while their father continued in his trance. Suddenly she stood up and threw the whole rod into the lake, shrieking as she did so, and wobbling the boat. Their father gripped the sides; he was totally disorientated. ‘What’s happening? Margie! Your rod!’

‘I got a huge bite!’ she said.

‘My God!’

‘And it just snatched the thing clean out of my hands!’

‘Were you holding it properly?’

‘I was, I was!’ She started to cry.

‘Okay, okay, never mind. We can easily get the rod. Don’t cry now. No big fuss.’

‘But you said I wasn’t doing it properly and I was.’

The boat was still rocking. Margie stamped her foot in the boat. It made a useless hollow sound and she tried again without much improvement. A boat on a lake was not a floor. She was utterly estranged from the normal apparatus of her temper. Paddy could have laughed but he was watchful in the boat. There was always the chance his sister’s violence would have consequences more lasting than the sharp passing disturbance which was her speciality.

‘Will you sit down, Margie dear. Please. Sit down dear, there’s no problem. My, that must have been a big old fish who liked your hook, eh. Did you see it, Paddy? Did you see the bite on the line?’

Margie had sat down in the boat and buried her face in her knees. Now she half-turned to look at Paddy, to see what her younger brother would do. It was in her nature to desire carnage and upset within the family. She was especially incensed by their father’s temperament, his good humour and gentleness, none of which she’d inherited. Yet she hated to be found out; it was the point on which her desire for trouble was finally half-hearted.