Somebody Loves Us All (13 page)

‘It’s a good bike.’

‘Do you know something about them?’

‘Alas,’ he said.

‘Alas what?’

‘I can’t.’

‘Can’t what? Bike?’ Harley was a disagreeable conversationalist, clinically MEF, meaningless enigmatic flow. Paddy could feel his good mood weakening under the spell of the other man’s knowingness. Geoff believed he’d already been Paddy. He’d had a bike. He’d done all that. Paddy regretted especially not having taken off his helmet but it was too late now.

‘The word came down,’ he said.

‘From?’

‘Exactly.’

Geoff flexed one of his legs, displaying perhaps some significant
stiffness that Paddy should inquire after. Paddy ignored the leg. The basement seemed a long way off. They both looked at the bike in the tiny space of the lift. Suddenly it seemed stupid and ugly and desperate. The bike was totally inadequate to the task it had been given, which was to carry forth the hopes of men of their age. Was this Helena’s silent point too? Paddy’s biking shoes made a loud clacking noise on the metal floor of the lift as he straightened the bike with an odd sort of roughness. What did he hope to achieve by this—to suggest that he was past the tender stage, that the bike was really nothing much to him? He’d already told Geoff he was a newbie. Finally the doors opened and Paddy pushed quickly away from Geoff Harley.

He called after Paddy. ‘I met your mother earlier, delightful.’

Paddy waved his hand over his head without turning around. Delightful? Why use that word? She was nice, his mother, she was agreeable, but no one had ever said she was delightful. She had little desire to charm. Perhaps in the Harleys’ world it made sense to say such things. These were the people who went out at night to watch for the light from wristwatches and mobile phones. He felt the temptation sharply to ask about these Thursday nights, Harley’s absences, but kept walking.

Paddy removed his shoes and took the stairs back up to their floor, thereby avoiding Geoff, who was still moving things around in his lock-up. He’d kept looking over to where Paddy was putting away the bike, hoping to get him on his way back to the lift. Paddy carried his shoes in his hand and opened the door to the stairs as soundlessly as he could. His socks left sweat marks on the polished wooden corridor. At his mother’s door he paused and listened. Nothing. He rang the buzzer but got no answer. If she were in, she’d be playing her game anyway. She’d be in her headphones, in Vienna or Geneva or Berlin or Paris.

He found he was wrong. Teresa had pushed a note under their front door. She’d caught the bus to Palmerston North to
see Pip and wouldn’t be back for a few days. Well, she was her own person. And the Pip visit had been something she’d spoken about before. Paddy couldn’t remember the precise details but there was a tragedy in Pip’s life. Her African husband had died. She’d stayed on. But now with Mugabe that was impossible. As girls, his mother and Pip had been close, and for a time they’d written to each other. The Skype contact had been recent.

Paddy woke up on Monday morning without Helena beside him. The phrase
his heart sank
occurred to him. He’d never been one to think, Good, the bed to myself. Usually they were in accord here, their feet hit the floor at the same moment. 

He found her working at the kitchen table, doing spreadsheets on her laptop. She’d been up since five. She’d worked every evening until late, and had gone back into the school on both Saturday and Sunday. The Ministry had put in a last-minute request for more information on the school’s business plan. Helena said they were also behind on several budget items. Then two of her staff had gone down with a stomach bug following a catered lunch designed to boost morale ahead of the review.

He brought her coffee. He modulated his voice to the carer’s tone. Kissed the top of her head. She turned to him briefly and smiled. Her face was waxy in colour. There was a slight tremor in her eyelids. She’d been rubbing her eyes often. How had he managed to underestimate this so badly? He should have felt remorse for his comparative idleness, and he did, and he also felt irritated—at what? Sad but true the idea that Helena, poor Helena, with her thoroughly admirable dedication, was the cause of his trashy response. She was a fraction deranged in throwing herself this completely at working towards an end that didn’t seem in doubt, and ideally there might have been something surprising and winning at his verbal command, a spell to break the spell. Recall the tui! But the ground he stood on was shaky. He felt vulnerable. His own crisis was small c. Hers took in
the livelihoods of others. His was vague, mid-lifey, not very interesting. His was existential-focused, hers was existence-focused. She won. He agreed she won. Hers also, however, had an endpoint. The review would take place. There’d be a result.

In the midst of her travails, he’d been biking every day, also deranged. He’d gone out to Island Bay, concentrating on keeping an even pace and trying to maintain a calm disposition in the traffic. Adelaide Road, Lant had warned him accurately, was busy, fairly narrow, and a funnel for crap drivers to enter and leave the central city. Twice Paddy yelled at cars. ‘Don’t let them spoil your ride,’ Lant told him. Private cursing he believed was the worst. Look closely and you saw lots of them, the muttering cyclists, people with valid grievances, driven inside themselves, stuck on complaint. Better to vent, call it to the wind, let it be blown behind you in a burst of saliva or be sucked ahead, words that you could then bike past. But Lant also said that gestures and shouts were generally useless; motorists understood finally only one thing: damage to their vehicle. A bang on the roof with the fist, a kick in the side panel. Of course you had to choose carefully when to express yourself like this. Lant said he’d once been pursued by two big blokes in a Falcon, finally losing them in an alley off Hania Street in Mount Vic.

At Island Bay Paddy sat on the stone wall looking out to sea. It was very Rita Angusy—the blue water oddly still, fixed in permanent agitation. A single fishing boat, painted in blazing red, rocked forcefully on its mooring between the little island and the shore. The beach was empty except for a woman far along from him who was throwing a stick into the water for her dog. It was a ruminative scene, he thought. Meaning it might have drawn from him a series of reflections. Here was the space, on the edge of land, in easy reach of elemental forces—sea and wind—where a person, alone, might consider things. Yet he found himself considering only the ride back along Adelaide Road. Already he was preparing himself for the battle. Biking seemed to refer to itself all the time. It was about biking. Perhaps this would change over time and there’d be an automatic set of
motions, allowing the free flow of thoughts. He’d had a taste of it on the homeward leg of the Seatoun ride with Lant.

Behind him on the road, a car was pulling a small trailer full of branches and garden rubbish most likely towards the tip. A few branches were hanging over the side of the trailer. Leaves flew up behind as he went around the bend into the next bay. Unsecured load, Paddy thought. Hazard, he thought. He saw himself riding behind that fuckwit.

The phone had rung a few times over the weekend. It was Dora. Helena had taken these calls in the bedroom, closing the door behind her. It wasn’t usual though she said afterwards that she hadn’t wanted to disturb Paddy. Each time the phone went he thought of Tony Gorzo, who still hadn’t called. Now with the daughter on the phone, Gorzo couldn’t get through. He’d asked whether things were all right with Dora, and Helena had only said that by now he had a good sense of her daughter. Paddy didn’t know if this was true. He had
a
sense. He had his army of prejudice. More significantly, the non-explanation rankled. It was unlike Helena. There was something chain-of-command about it.

His mother had texted to say she’d be back from Palmie on Monday.

That morning he saw Trudy (language delay), Kevin (pragmatic language) and Caleb. He’d bumped Sam Covenay into the afternoon, claiming an emergency. Friday’s session had been more of the usual. Blank boy, thwarted man. Paddy felt he needed a few wins under his belt. A straightforward run of appointments would be good for everyone.

It was Caleb’s last day so Paddy said, ‘Why’d you need me for.’ The boy looked very puzzled but smiled. Why wasn’t Paddy getting out the paper and pencils, the Lego, the little cars they sometimes played with? Caleb was six years old and he was
better—he knew it. When he’d started sessions a few months before, he used a more or less private language with his mother Julie and then she would translate for everyone else. The first couple of sessions he wanted her there with him in case Paddy didn’t understand. He refused to have his hand held but he wanted her there. It was a mix of fricative problems and consonant clusters that Julie had instinctively understood. He said
geen
for green, which was easy. He said
single
for jingle. But there were other trickier things, and recognising that he was having trouble being understood, he’d developed articulation issues through classic over-emphasis. Kids like Caleb often started by shouting words in frustration, mangling them even more, and usually ended up mumbling, simply passing over the troubling sounds to make themselves understood with the minimum fuss. When he first came to clinic Caleb was somewhere in between. Success with his mother—her cleverness in deciphering the sounds—had meant his frustration levels were manageable. He was also smart enough to see he was going to have to broaden his language base beyond his clever mother if he were to go forward. Now with his consonants in order and improved articulation through exercises, he knew he wouldn’t have to rely on the translation process.

When she arrived, Julie, a published poet, handed Paddy a sheet of paper. She was his poetry supplier, lending him slim vols. On her recommendation he’d ordered Elizabeth Bishop. He now had it beside his bed. His poetry reading had floundered somewhere in high school. He was still wired to read poetry, more or less, as fiction, or for sense, which he knew was fairly arrested. He had to admit he liked people in poetry, stories. Bishop’s characters and narratives were appealing. Aunt Consuelo at the dentist, the fisherman with his fish that had skin like ancient wallpaper, the oil-stained family who run the petrol station, or ‘Filling Station’ as the poem is titled, with their dirty dog lying on a greasy wicker sofa. The person in the poem has pulled in to get petrol and amid the oil and dirt, she sees, sort of horrified, there’s an embroidered doily on a table, Why oh why the doily,
and a begonia, which she calls the extraneous plant. Then the visitor thinks, amazed, sort of humbled, someone embroidered the doily, someone waters the plant, or oils it, she quips. It was also very funny, Elizabeth Bishop’s poem. The poem’s last line he had by heart, could summon easily and did so from time to time in a jokey fashion: ‘Somebody loves us all.’ Meaning not God but simply a person close by. He approved. A somebody trying to make a difference, a mark. The somebody was also the poet herself, he saw, whose lines, at the very moment they appeared to judge and to discard, yet loved the things she described. A big hirsute begonia.

Julie said she’d written a poem with them in it—Caleb, Paddy, Julie herself—and she hoped he didn’t mind. Paddy asked her to read it. The poem used her son’s language to tell the story so it was punctuated with the seeming nonsense of his earlier speech as well as celebrating finally his success. It was also sad somehow. The poem suggested, very lightly, that in getting better, something had been lost. She’d baked Paddy some ginger gems that were in a shopping bag inside a plastic container. ‘I don’t need the container back,’ she said. She had tears in her eyes and Caleb ran into the corridor. ‘Be careful, Caleb darling,’ she called after him. Then she looked at the wall. ‘But you took the picture down,’ she said. It had been in the poem. Paddy explained that it was getting remounted. ‘I made up a few things about the picture, I hope that was all right,’ she said. ‘Do you mind me asking what the real story is behind it. I hope it was you!’

‘It was me,’ he said. ‘And I liked your version better.’ In the poem the cartoon had been the gift of one of his clients, someone a bit like her son. This had surprised and pleased him, he said. The technique, the freedom to invent even with this most real of events, her son’s triumph. Paddy told her the cartoon had been done a number of years ago by a newspaper cartoonist, and that his partner, Helena, had thought it might be fun to hang it in the office.

They were standing in the doorway to the apartment to keep
watch on Caleb. He was putting an eye to the handrail that ran along one wall, trying to see into it.

Paddy remembered how Bill Goldson, or W.G. as he was known, had been commissioned by the editor to do the portrait cartoon after some anniversary, Paddy’s first year or his second. The offer of the column had come in the same week that Paddy had officially been confirmed as divorced from Bridget and not long after he’d set up his private practice. One of his first clients had been the son of the deputy editor at the paper and the father had asked him whether he was interested in writing for them. There would be a trial period at first and there wasn’t much money. Paddy agreed to it because he thought it might help his business. Surprisingly the thing took off. There were a lot of letters to the editor as well as a steady stream of inquiries to use Paddy’s services. Having worked in hospitals, he’d had little more than a hunch about the market demand for more broad-based speech therapy. It happened that setting up his practice coincided with a growing anxiety among parents around their children’s abilities to communicate effectively. The question of whether it coincided with a matching increase in such problems was itself part of Paddy’s work. He did a lot of assessments that steered potential clients away from him into other more profitable areas for them, namely family guidance sessions, budgeting services, occasionally the family court. Still, soon he had a waiting list.

The letters to the editor waxed and waned though he was assured that in reader surveys the column continued to be very popular. Then he was asked if he wanted a portrait done. This honour usually went to retiring long-timers but there’d been a mini-exodus of star columnists and some shoring up was in order, even involving rather arcane contributors such as himself. They would also use the cartoon, in miniature form, alongside the column each time in a design revamp. There’d previously been nothing except the column name and a by-line. It was a little sweetener and Paddy was touched. In fact the true sweetening was for W.G., who was just then being wooed by their rivals. The
commission for drawing the cartoons was foolishly generous, as W.G., breaking his own confidentiality clause, cheerfully informed Paddy during the little presentation ceremony at the pub. ‘I’ll buy you a drink or seven, Patrick,’ he said.

In one corner of the cartoon he’d drawn an object Paddy couldn’t identify.

‘Cards,’ said W.G. ‘Playing cards.’

‘But I don’t play cards.’

He pretended not to hear this. ‘They also represent your fate.’

‘What is my fate?’

‘It’s in the cards, Patrick,’ he said, moving off with his whisky. No one at the paper knew that Paddy’s nickname was Card; the coincidence wasn’t amazing and yet it was the one stupid aspect that he grew to like about the picture, this accident.

In those days of course he had a little more hair. Bill, W.G., had suggested through a few wavy lines, some abundance. The cartoon Paddy also had his mouth open, apparently making an ‘O’—reference to his profession, which W.G. had not the faintest idea about. His sister Margie had said that it made Paddy look like a slightly uglier Lord Byron about to receive some dental work. Open wide! He’d been given a collar that was too big—this may have been the Byronic echo—a collar on some puffy shirt he would never have worn. Was this some lab coat? He’d asked W.G. about it. ‘A cartoon exaggerates, Patrick,’ he told him. ‘Why choose my collar to exaggerate though?’ said Paddy. The rest of him was more or less Paddy. W.G. had no answer to that.

Paddy stood holding the baking and the poem as Caleb’s mother smiled. She still had teary eyes. Finally they chatted about Elizabeth Bishop. He should read the letters, Julie said. Caleb came back to them along the corridor. She reached down to pick something off her son’s shoe. It was one of Paddy’s yellow stickies.

When the apartment doorbell rang around noon, Paddy had to check his watch. Sam Covenay wasn’t due for another hour. Then just as he was opening the door, he had a presentiment of some unwelcome news. Afterwards it felt too occult to be this, yet at the time he thought he heard it in his right ear, the tinnitus of trouble.

The person Paddy wondered about most sharply in that instant was Tony Gorzo. He was coming to tell him why he hadn’t called. In all the years of their phone calls they’d only met face to face three or four times. Somehow it suited them. Voices down the line.

He stood in front of Paddy, holding out his hand. ‘Good afternoon,’ he said. ‘I am Iyob.’