Somebody Loves Us All (16 page)

They were allowed to take Teresa to the hospital café as long as they returned her for final clearance once the sedative had worn off. She was back in her clothes and she seemed like a different person, different again. Still not her.

‘What do you feel like eating, Ma?’ said Stephanie, who’d walked her arm-in-arm along the corridors.

‘Every-ting!’ said Teresa. She squeezed her daughter’s arm and giggled. She began loading muffins and sandwiches and cakes on her tray.

The change in her demeanour was striking and almost totally a side-effect of the drug in her body. Paddy wasn’t sure she’d fully taken in what Murray Blanchford had just told them having looked at the scan images. No evidence of stroke, no evidence of tumour, and no evidence of haematoma.

‘That’s strange then, isn’t it,’ said Teresa.

Stephanie had begun to cry quietly at this point.

‘But I’d still like to do an MRI for a better picture,’ said Blanchford.

‘Then you’ll find the collpreet.’

Blanchford leaned forward, trying to hear the word.

‘Culprit,’ said Helena.

At the table Paddy said, ‘What’s happening, Ma? How do you feel?’

‘Great. I feel fine.’ She clapped her hands. Everyone had to laugh at that.

‘You sound like a frog,’ said Stephanie.

‘Very bizarre, I know,’ said Teresa.

‘What will the kids say when they hear you?’

‘They’ll chase me around and say do dee do dee do!’

‘When did it happen, Teresa?’ said Helena.

‘Thérèse,’ she said, smiling, making her name fully French. ‘Trees are green. Thérèse, never. Vendredi. It was last vendredi.’

‘What are you, bilingual now?’ said Stephanie.

‘No. Just a couple of words. I bought a dictionary. She told me my English was very good!’ She laughed and put more food in her mouth. She was ravenous.

‘French pig!’ said Stephanie.

Paddy exchanged looks with Helena. He hadn’t yet had a chance to say anything to her about Iyob, whose visit seemed ancient, belonging to another zone.

‘Mummy, are you kidding us?’ said Stephanie. ‘Are you having a joke?’

‘Yes.’

‘You are?’

‘Yes, you are.’

‘Well that doesn’t make sense to say that. “Yes, you are.” Don’t go crazy as well, please.’

‘I wondered whether you’ve been playing online against someone from France?’ said Paddy.

Their mother stopped eating to consider this question but then failed to answer.

‘Do you feel tired at all?’ said Helena. ‘Tiredness can make the brain do all sorts of things.’

‘You had that bug,’ said Stephanie.

‘Then the bus ride to Palmerston North,’ said Paddy.

‘Where?’

‘Palmerston North, to see Pip.’

‘Pup?’

‘Peep,’ he said.

‘Oh,’ she said vaguely. ‘Yes, now she told me to get it checked out. She’s full of—sense, Pip. But we laughed all the time too. You know I don’t know what I’m doing here. I feel completely normal, except for …’ She was searching for the way to complete the sentence but finally gave up.

‘You sound, when you speak English, utterly French, you know that?’ he said.

‘Patrick, I’m not mad! I can hear myself. I’m fully aware of this.’
Theese
.

‘Have you taken any new medication?’

‘Oh my gosh! Yes, I took these new French pills, do you think that’s it?’

‘What French pills?’

‘Oh, please, I was joking!’

‘Joking just for that or the whole thing?’

‘For that, about the pills. I haven’t done anything, taken anything. I woke up last Friday and I thought, “It’s vendredi”, that’s all. So I looked it up and it meant Friday. And I knew how to say it, apparently. There’d been an item on the radio.’
Rar-
dee-o
.

‘What item?’ said Stephanie.

She explained about the French truck drivers, the snail. ‘Voilà!’

‘Voilà?’ said Paddy. It was something Murray Blanchford should know.

‘Thinking about it, you know, maybe here’s an opportunity, I thought to myself.’

‘For what?’ said Stephanie.

‘For … enchantment.’ She regarded her plate of food happily. ‘Although I wonder how I’ll feel when it wears off. I must talk a lot until then! I must embrace it. I must!’

They ate in silence for a while after that. Despite her excited announcement, his mother appeared to be running low. She rallied again however. ‘I don’t like the idea of having my brain scanned,’ she said, seemingly unaware it had already happened. ‘If I’ve had a stroke, then it’s a done deal. I’ve had a stroke. Now get on with it. If I’m sick another way, if there’s a tumour in there which is doing all this talking, I feel okay, let him or her have a brief say. We’ve never heard from a tumour before, or at least I haven’t. A French tumour!’

‘Let’s not talk about things like that,’ said Stephanie.

‘Okay, darling.’

Helena’s phone rang and she moved away from the table to answer it. There were only a few other people in the café. Every so often a café worker appeared to look over the food and to take away empty plates.

Now there seemed a strange sullenness to things. The druggy fun they’d all taken advantage of seemed cheap, unreal. Soon they’d have to drive home. The clean CT scan had delivered an odd sort of result: one that was both deeply promising and deeply puzzling.

It was dark outside. They’d lost sense of time. A woman in a stained white tunic flicked off the lights above the warm food counter. An orderly appeared at the door with a mop, looked around the café, and then reversed out in the same direction moon-walk fashion, grinning. Paddy recognised at once the little provoking amusements of hospital life.

Helena came back and apologised. When Paddy looked again at his mother she’d paused almost in mid-bite. She held a piece of cake, which after a few moments she returned to her plate. She sat glumly watching the cake. There was a sense of utter emptiness in her look, as if the sedation’s exuberant tide had suddenly sucked everything from her. She raised her head. They were all looking at her. She was afraid of them. What did she feel like right then—a foreigner? ‘Don’t lock me up, will you?’ she said.

They had to listen carefully now since the accent was very thick.

‘What?’ said Stephanie. There were tears in her eyes. ‘What did she say?’

‘Darling,’ said Helena, taking his mother’s hand.

He sat with Helena in his mother’s kitchen. The only light came from a lamp in the hallway. Teresa was asleep in the bedroom. Stephanie had stayed for an hour or so and then she’d had to pick up her girls and get them to bed. There was the barbecue
fundraiser the next evening at Isabelle’s school, Stephanie reminded them. She was expected on one of the stands. ‘Your friend’s band is playing too,’ she told Paddy. ‘But we can’t go, can we. We can’t. What are the rules now? What do we do?’ They agreed to decide on all that in the morning.

They’d found a note from Medbh pushed under the apartment door—everyone was pushing notes under their door!—saying she could come later in the week and she’d ring tomorrow to confirm. On their phone there was a message from Angela Covenay who was sending her best wishes. She hoped everything was all right. Stephanie would be phoning Margaret, which was most likely a mistake though Paddy was glad not to have the job.

Helena and Paddy had been over the possible causes, the possible outcomes. They were both deliriously tired. For Helena of course it was a compounded tiredness. How had she kept going? On her laptop they’d read again as many Foreign Accent Syndrome stories as they could handle. There were references in German she’d struggled through, though these cases were from the early 1900s.

More recently, these. An elderly Egyptian woman in Cairo wakes up speaking in a thick Scottish brogue. An Argentinean polo player falls off his horse and speaks what one observer identifies as Gaelic. A young professional Czech speedway rider, Matej Kus, crashes in a race in Glasgow and is heard to speak perfect English to the paramedics attending him. Kus has only ever been able to speak a few English phrases with a heavy Czech accent.

‘A boy at my high school,’ said Paddy, ‘his mother became a witch, which is not the same thing, but this reminds me of that. They got a special oven in their backyard.’

‘Coven?’

‘Oven. Do witches bake something?’

Helena didn’t know.

‘Part of me thinks, just go with it,’ he said. ‘Take her lead. Take Teresa’s lead, or Thérèse. But which one? The enchanted mother or the one scared out of her wits?’

‘The key thing is that the whole business is temporary, that seems to be the pattern.’

‘Already she’s lasted longer than most.’

‘I have a good feeling about the morning,’ said Helena. ‘I believe in the basic goodness of sleep. If only I could get some.’ She closed the laptop. This gave him an unexpected and strong feeling of loss. Their options for finding out more and more seemed over now. It was the first time he’d ever felt this way about the Internet. Helena leaned across and kissed him kindly on the forehead. The kiss sent a little buzzing right down his left leg to the sole of his foot.

Often the apparent oddness of Foreign Accent Syndrome could be explained through some distant connection. The Egyptian woman with the brogue had had a Scottish nanny, something like that. In none of these cases did the sudden rearrangement last longer than a day or two and frequently the victim returned to normal in a matter of minutes. The Czech motorcyclist, Kus, was particularly disappointed. Speaking through an interpreter, once he’d recovered—that is, lost—his facility, he said, ‘I was hoping I could go on speaking English like that. It’s very important to travel and compete on the international circuit to have English but now I’ll have to learn it like everyone else, which is a real pain. I think I’ll try to have another smash.’ He was a member of the Berwick Bandits and the team’s English promoter said, ‘I never really believed it was possible but this incredible thing was happening in front of us.’

There was an exception they found.

‘Poor Linda Walker from Newcastle kept going for weeks,’ said Paddy. ‘What happened finally, we don’t know. There was no follow-up piece that we found. Did we look every-where?’

Following a stroke, Linda Walker had developed an accent that was a mixture of Jamaican, Canadian and Slovak. She jumped around from day to day. ‘I’ve lost my identity, because I never talked like this before. I’m a very different person and it’s
strange and I don’t like it. I didn’t realise what I sounded like, but then my speech therapist played a tape of me talking. I was just devastated.’

Away from the Oxford team, there was another theory about FAS. If the brain was unaffected, there was the possibility it was a fine motor skills problem, an adjustment of troublesome phonemes. The speaker, unable to make the old distinctions, begins substituting sounds and ends by mimicking the whole accent. That was potentially the best news they’d heard all day. Phonemes were his kind of thing. Pad, pat, bad and bat.

Helena placed her hand on the laptop, sealing it even more completely. ‘Your mother hasn’t had a stroke. On first look. That’s a huge plus.’

‘True.’

‘A huge plus, I’d say.’

‘On a first look, no stroke. I agree. And no evidence of a tumour, on a first look. CTs miss lots of tumours, we know that.’

‘But nothing yet.’

‘And there are no huge blood clots there, so that’s good.’

‘Very good.’

‘The brain is a strange beast.’

‘Sometimes there’s a knock to the system. Then things settle down.’

‘One scenario, there was a haematoma from her bathroom fall, it dissipated naturally, she’ll return to her old self.’

‘It’s a definite possibility.’

They’d already been through all this. Yet it was good to hear it once more. Their terms of reference weren’t at all high-flown or particularly informed but it was Murray Blanchford himself who’d given them nearly all their statements. These were his words they traded and somehow even an adjective as weak as ‘strange’ took on an almost medical depth. Once he’d given up on humour, Blanchford had proved a straightforward and decent person.

‘We know that the brain,’ said Helena, quoting Paddy from
several minutes earlier quoting Blanchford, ‘has extraordinary powers of recovery.’

‘Extraordinary powers full stop,’ he said.

‘Who knows what decisions are being made by it as we speak, as she sleeps, recovering. Who knows?’

‘We can only guess.’ Paddy took her wrist and held it. He felt the broad bones and against his thumb, the tendons. He felt the pulse. Perhaps it was his own pulse beating in the tips of his fingers as they touched each other in the circling grip. ‘Or, you know, it’s not brain-related at all.’

‘Motor skills,’ she said.

‘Exactly. Before all this, she probably knew what French bread was, a baguette. She’s been to England and Scotland and Ireland and to Canada but not to Quebec and she’s been to Australia. I think that’s it. The adventures of an Anglophone. Pourquoi Français? Because she listens to a thing on the news?’

‘It’s not really French though, is it. It’s just what it sounds like. Still, we have the trigger, possible trigger. We don’t know how that works but still. The radio. That’s good, I think. That’s a cause which is entirely harmless. It’s motor skills and the radio thing.’

‘I think we’ve solved it!’ he said.

‘Oh, Paddy.’

He brought her wrist close to himself and placed it against his chest. This, he thought, was calming, one of those gestures that seemed about to unlock forever the mysteries of our individual selves, the way we’re trapped in private spheres and the way we long for some kind of curing connection. He saw again the young baby turning its head towards its mother as they stood on the hillside footpath watching the cretinous possessed man bike past in his stupid frenzy.

‘You know, Paddy,’ said Helena, ‘that she might need speech therapy.’

‘Crossed my mind,’ he said.

‘In some ways it’s like the orthodontist whose child needs braces.’

The comparison made him think uselessly of Sam Covenay and his closed mouth. His own adolescence even. Orthodontists were psychic vandals, weren’t they. ‘You think a discount is in order?’