Somebody Loves Us All (2 page)

Apparently when he was a boy Paddy had been a frequent and vocal sleepwalker, arriving in the living room late at night, sitting beside his parents and taking up some obscure debate, trying to draw them in. ‘Don’t you see?’ he asked them urgently. ‘Don’t you?’ Evidently his father was terrified when this chatty zombie joined them. He couldn’t do a thing, froze and stared, until Paddy’s mother led the babbling sleeping boy out. He remembered none of it—did any sleepwalker? Plus he knew nothing about this when it was going on. It was never reported to him. He had to wait until he was an adult. He’d brought Bridget around to Lower Hutt for dinner. It was before they were married. Teresa told the story for no reason he could think of except this. Strangers i.e. non family members visiting the house could provoke her into saying things that were oddly disloyal and aggressive e.g. you’re marrying into a line of possibly unreliable males. The sleepwalking wasn’t especially funny in the narration though Teresa might have believed she was being entertaining. Visitors made her speed up. Anyway, listening to his mother Paddy felt his father mocked. The big idea about his father was extreme kindness, gentleness, forbearance. They loved his memory for that. The shadow was ineffectuality. That
his son’s sleepwalking could paralyse him was a direct hit. One interpretation was that Teresa was keeping the family clean of foreign taint, preserving the genetic stock, though presumably stock had to replicate itself to earn the name and how did she imagine things could go forward if she was blowing off potential mates? Not that it presented at all like this. Bridget didn’t say a word afterwards. It was his sister Margie who’d always thought their mother sneaky and undermining. Certainly she had the shy person’s combativeness when in situations that challenged her nature to lift a notch. She’d never been a good host. Too busy testing for the fittest.

Since Teresa had moved next door, he’d been far more prone than usual to such reconsiderations. Her very footsteps, though they went unheard—the building’s soundproofing had holes but the flooring was highly absorbent—still sounded, still wandered in his direction. He listened. He found this out about himself. He was listening when he was in his office. Almost snooping. It was unexpected.

In his office he stood up and found on his shelves his yellow-stickied copy of
Middlemarch
. He read a few bits, flicking through pages, and several of the stickies fell out, having lost their adhesiveness. He’d always read with this system, fiction and professional journals and books. His flagged library amused Helena. The stickies had notes written on them. He’d thought it useful but as a system it was obviously flawed. Anyway, it was good enough to turn up the passage with the quote about metaphors. Casaubon, the dry religious scholar, about to marry Dorothea, defeating her other suitor, Sir James Chettham, and securing a match he’d hardly dreamed of—a lovely young brilliant woman whose only aspiration seems to be to learn at his knee and to help him with his big life’s-work book—is surprised he doesn’t feel greater excitement—‘delight’ is the word—when outwardly his situation appears so good. This, Eliot says, feeling ‘more tenderly towards his experience of success than towards the disappointment of the amiable Sir James’, is because he has fallen victim to metaphor. Casaubon, the antisocial bachelor,
believed he had money in the bank, that he’d been saving up his pleasure for just this sort of day: ‘a compound interest of enjoyment’. But nothing is saved. Casaubon feels blankness. The emotions, Eliot suggests, are only present in the present, made on the spot. It’s an empty vault you open. You hoard air. This was how he’d deployed the moment in presentations and addresses. Children with speech problems weren’t saving themselves for a later and miraculous fluency. It was best to unlock the vault now.

Then there was this from the same great book: ‘Few things held the perceptions more thoroughly captive than anxiety about what we have got to say.’ That could make said vault rather stiff to open.

Later the same evening—the evening of The Day the Bike Arrived—Paddy didn’t believe it was coincidental—Helena told him that at his request she’d once covered first husband Max’s body in a Vaseline-like substance and pushed him down a gentle slope of ice somewhere near Zurich. Paddy hadn’t heard this before. At night she’d treated his burns. She’d been twenty-one, twenty-two, working as a maid in Max’s father’s hotel, overseas for the first time. Paddy, too, had worked in a hotel, though under very different circumstances, the details of which he’d never fully spelled out for Helena.

‘All that from just a BA in German literature,’ he said.

‘BA Honours,’ she said.

Her thesis was in a box somewhere in their lock-up, hardbound in black: ‘Sorrows and Sensations in Nineteenth-Century Verse Drama.’ He’d held it out to her once and she’d laughed, wouldn’t take it from him, told him to put it back in the box. He saw her pride. Also she’d travelled quite far from all that. Not that there was any suggestion she’d sold out or anything daft. But she felt complex things about her past, he thought. This was part of the project of being together as late-in-life comrades, to gradually, over time, without hurry, find out such information. Or wait it out more likely. He wasn’t going to push.

‘Goethe would have been impressed,’ he said. ‘Especially with the Vaseline-like substance. What was it, an experiment?’

‘I can’t really remember.’

‘At the hotel, did you have a maid’s uniform?’

‘Have we headed into some fantasy of yours?’ She had a playful look in her eye, which he was glad to see. Lately he’d missed it. They hated crooks with their faces hidden by newspapers, but they also hated the Ministry of Education and poured curses on its procedures. Dodgy operators scamming in China and South Korea were evil, so was the word compliance. ‘For the record, I wore a black skirt. White shirt, black skirt.’

‘The classic look.’

‘Well I had orange streaks in my hair.’ She touched her hair in a remembering way. She wasn’t wistful often and when it struck, you were affected.

She was greying now, from the front moving back. It was one of his jobs, to put on the slippery plastic gloves and rinse out the dye until the water ran clear—to be her hairdresser! It gave him a wonderful sense of loving to see the back of her neck, her ears. At forty, almost overnight, he’d lost most of his black and a good deal of the hair itself. Better that than the slow years of thinning. You mourned it and then you got on with things. If a miracle cure came through, you laughed at it and tried it. Noni juice, he recalled, from a fruit and vegetable shop in Newtown. ‘Orange streaks? Was that popular at the time?’

‘Among Bavarian chambermaids, you mean? I believe it made me stand out.’

‘Chambermaids, what a word. It makes me think you were locked up in a cellar in a remote chalet, fed through the bars of a cage.’

‘I’m pleased Max never thought of that.’

Later in bed, he was aware of Helena shifting onto her back, her position for talking. He’d already been there for forty sleepless minutes.

‘Tony Gorzo still hasn’t called,’ she said.

‘No,’ he said.

‘Why don’t you call him?’

‘Not how it works.’ In the paper he’d checked the death notices.

He asked Helena about her work, the weekend, but her answers were quickly trailing off. She mumbled something about Dora, her daughter—usually a topic to be slightly wary of.

He listened to Helena’s breathing. Was she asleep? She could switch off this suddenly, it was a great skill. Plus she’d been at the laptop throughout the week.

‘What will you do, wear a helmet?’ she said groggily.

After a moment he understood the change in topic. The bicycle.

She sat up and took a sip from her glass of water beside the bed—she needed constant brief sips, as if dehydrated by lifting an arm, moving a leg—and then lay down again. There was more to it. Helena had a chronic reflux problem. It sounded stupid even to him but when she first announced this problem, he felt his love increase. She chewed grey tablets the size of small biscuits and kept glasses of water in all the rooms. In the middle of the night she often woke suddenly, sitting bolt upright with a gasp, her hand pressed to her chest as though she’d been shot. She’d then take a couple of controlling breaths, a sip of water, and lie down again. When it happened the first few times Paddy was with her, he also sat up in alarm, thinking that someone was in the room. Who is it? he said. What’s happening? Who’s there? In a way, he supposed, he thought it was Dora doing this to her.

‘Of course, I’ll wear a helmet,’ he said. He kissed her, told her goodnight, and she was sleeping by the time he turned his back.

Teresa stood in front of the meat counter at Moore Wilson’s, asking for the sausages which Paddy, her son, had recommended as the best. Sausage heaven, he said. She’d never felt that excited by sausages or even food in general. It disappointed her whenever people started talking about great dishes they’d had. She barely remembered what she ate. Fishbones caught in her throat. Anyway, pork and fennel were apparently the ones to go for, made by the craftsmen butchers of Island Bay. The young man serving hadn’t heard her order properly and she repeated it. ‘Those,’ she said, pointing in the display case. The sausages were in stainless steel trays, stacked in important mounds.

He grabbed a large handful and put them on the scales. ‘You were saying “Island Bay”, I get it now. Fennel.’

‘Exactly,’ said Teresa, or something like it.

He was putting more on, interpreting something else she’d said, hadn’t said. ‘Sorry.’ He gave her a big smile. The sausages cost thirty dollars, which shocked her, and she’d got too many of them for just herself and Stephanie. She could give some to Paddy. In the refrigerated section behind her, she found a sealed pack of frankfurters and added these to her basket for the girls. They wouldn’t be able to eat the fennel.

At the bread counter she said, ‘Pain au chocolat, two please.’ These could be cut up for dessert that night. But two, wasn’t that a bit mingy for all of them? Amazing she still had to battle against this bending towards cheapness, still! Would there be fights at the ranch? She wanted things easy for Steph, aware too
that Steph had a fear of bad dietary habits. She wouldn’t have Coke in the house or anything except the plainest biscuits in the tins. That weekend Teresa was going to the Wairarapa with her daughter and her three granddaughters. Stephanie had planned it a month ago.

The woman hovered with her tongs. ‘What was that again?’

Teresa pointed. ‘There, pain au chocolat.’

‘Okay. And how many? Just one?’

‘Two.’ She’d meant to increase the amount but she was flustered.

‘Two?’ The woman still seemed unclear.

Teresa held up the fingers. It was torture.

‘There you go. Thank you.’

She couldn’t find any goat’s cheese in the refrigerated section. An employee was restocking close to her and she asked him if they had any.

‘Coat?’

‘Goat,’ said Teresa.

‘Gert?’

‘No!’ She laughed at him to see if that made a difference.

He kept a serious look on his face. ‘It’s a type or that’s the company who makes it?’

‘It’s the animal that makes it!’ she said.

‘The animal is a gert, what do you call it?’

What did it take, an actual impersonation? Should she butt him? A creeping humiliation drained the comedy.

Vendredi, she thought. Novembre.

He looked over to a colleague who was behind the counter hanging salami on hooks. ‘Hey Dorf, we got any cheese made from a grit?’

‘A what?’ said Dorf.

‘A goat,’ said Teresa, quietly now, beginning to doubt the animal herself. ‘Goat’s cheese.’

Dorf shook his head. Then he pointed at Teresa. ‘You mean goat’s cheese, right.’

Near the checkout counters she took a bottle of fresh orange
juice from a stand and a packet of coloured pasta. It was possible to get through the payment part without speaking and this she accomplished.

Before Moore Wilson’s, she’d been to Whitcoulls and purchased a pocket French dictionary. She didn’t quite know why. This French business would fade, she thought. People woke up with afflictions of various kinds and they passed. While the girl was scanning it, Teresa saw a box of coloured pens and asked for this to be added to the purchase. They could come in handy in the Wairarapa. Stephanie had sent through photos of the place; there was a long window-seat in the conservatory and she saw the girls kneeling there, drawing pictures while Stephanie and Teresa read their books, drank their weak gins. At a certain point, once the girls were in bed, they’d talk about Paul Shawn, the children’s father, and her daughter would cry silently, without too much passion. Then she’d sleep for twelve hours, waking to find Teresa had given the girls their breakfast and taken them to the park.

The girl looked up and said, ‘How long have you been in New Zealand?’

‘Me?’ said Teresa.

She held up the dictionary. ‘Your English is very good!’

‘Thank you,’ said Teresa. Absurdly, she felt pleased. The girl, she discovered, was grinning in encouragement, hoping to hear more. She turned and left, suddenly shy, a little hallucinatory under the fluorescent lighting.

I’ve been here seventy-eight years and counting.

That morning she’d woken as usual to the radio news. They were in the middle of a story from France, where truck drivers were going ‘to make the snail’, use their vehicles to block motorways. They were interviewing a truckie. His words were translated. Behind the English, you could still hear his voice. ‘This is our
message to the politicians and the oil companies. If you are stuck behind my truck in your limousines, you will smell my farts!’

She decided, in the abstract at least, she approved of French truck drivers.

Someone, a spokesperson, sober and measured and dull, was saying how pointless and harmful it was to the economy. Counter-productive. He was French but spoke in English. The behaviour, he said, was a ‘relic’, a
rayleek
she heard and the drivers were not snails but dinosaurs. Deenosaurs. She thought vaguely of Dean Martin, whom she didn’t have a good handle on. He was different from Frank Sinatra, was he? She saw a thin drunk man in a dinner jacket with a cigarette, smiling at something risqué he’d just said, or was just about to say.
Risqué
was a French word. She couldn’t think of anything for longer than a second before it headed towards this. Then she drifted back to sleep. When she woke again, it was vendredi. She had the word so far to the front of her mouth that she had to produce it, like the pointed stone of a plum. She said it aloud. She didn’t have a shred of the language, yet here it was.

Teresa walked to the computer in the dining room, still in her pyjamas, and went online. This at least was normal. She always turned on the computer before doing anything else, going to the toilet, eating breakfast. She went to it as to an oracle. Of course the word meant Friday, and it was: today was vendredi. She said it aloud again, rather nicely. That was interesting again. Perhaps she had known the days of the week after all. Mercredi was familiar, like mercury, which as a girl she’d once had to spit from her mouth, having stupidly bitten a thermometer, a single melted bullet dropping and running through her fingers like something escaping her fever. Both her parents had stood there, unable for a second to comprehend what had happened; the act so far out of the range of her character that for a moment she thought: They don’t know who I am. I could be anyone lying here.

Skype had opened and she read a chat message from Pip sent late the night before. How are you darling? Can’t sleep. I
keep having the same nightmare: I’ve come to live in Palmerston North.

Pip was her cousin, her great and long-distance friend. After a lifetime in Zimbabwe, she’d come to live in Palmerston North. Her husband had been killed, but that was long before Mugabe. Teresa had never met him, a Yorkshireman, only seen photos. David. He had a beard and was the manager on a tobacco farm before moving into the city after some problems. In a robbery, he was stabbed. David had been collecting the unsold bread from a supermarket to distribute to shelters as part of a church charity group. The crime belonged anywhere, Pip had said. It was mindless. She continued to love the people, the country, and she had stayed on. In the early Rhodesian days, there’d been the letters. Come, wrote her cousin, come, come, come. She described the streets, the things she’d seen in the markets, the local gardens, the giraffes ‘mooching in the trees’. ‘The dusty pink of the sunsets.’ ‘The blackness of the blacks.’ She was swimming in a friend’s concrete pool. The friend kept frogs to eat the pupae of the mosquitoes. Okay, then maybe I will. They’d both devoured
Sally in Rhodesia
. That book lit the fire.

How am I? Teresa wondered. Well, different, that was clear. When she looked in the mirror, she seemed the same. She spoke into her reflection and saw it. Her lips came forward and the muscles at the corners of her mouth were tight. She was acting. Her mouth felt sore. Her tongue was tired, which was a very strange sensation. The fatigue was astonishingly local.

It was Novembre, too, which she also pronounced perfectly, as far as she could tell, but how did she even know that much, that it was correct? The girl chasing the mercury around her wicker bedspread was monolingual, an ignoramus when it came to such things, though a student eventually of typewriters and foot-controlled dictaphones. You pressed down under the desk and a man’s voice spoke in your ear. Dear Mr Peters.

She’d caught it from the
radio
? Maybe she was crazy and this was a sign, a symptom. She hadn’t been waiting for it exactly, yet she knew she was now only five years younger than her mother
had been when that mind, without pity on its owner, crumbled, admitting the barefoot dietician with the silken beard and the stopwatch.

In her eighties, her mother had grown to believe Teresa’s father was secretly in love with the young Samoan woman next door and these were his illegitimate children coming through the hedge. He gave them eggs from his hens.

One afternoon, a few months before her mother died, Teresa had stood beside her as they watched from the window her father, a retired teacher, carefully handing the eggs to a young boy and girl. Her parents lived in a state house in Naenae. The wind flew against the high hedge at the rear of the property, turning it silver for a moment before switching it back. The leaves were glossy on one side and thick. They tempted you to touch them, and then they disappointed you somehow. Beyond the hedge, and through a little opening in the branches, there was barren public land that sloped down to a concrete waterway patrolled by stray cats. Teresa had always felt this place to be particularly desolate and despairing, though when they visited, her children often played there, if it could be called playing. You followed the waterway in one direction and came to a sports field which, in winter, smelled of rotting vegetation due to poor drainage. If you headed north instead, wading in the motionless shin-deep water, eventually you reached a culvert sealed off with a metal grill. She imagined in a flash her children swallowed into the darkness of the tunnel. Weeds and rubbish caught against the bars. She’d accompanied the kids once, Paddy walking in gumboots in the water, the girls on the grass. Lift your head and above the culvert you saw the hillside cemetery, the sun striking its tilted plane, where both her parents would one day be buried. Near the edge of the concrete waterway she’d almost stepped on the body of a dead rat. The hair on the body was brushed the wrong way. She’d scooped up Stephanie in her arms before she got a good look and jogged up to the line of hedges, calling to the other two who were bent over it. At such times she felt excessively widowed—widowed again and again,
moment by moment, that it was ongoing and not a single event in the past.

‘I can’t believe he’s done this to me,’ her mother said at the window, ‘but at least he has the decency to treat them well.’ Then she took Teresa’s hand and held it tightly. The neighbour’s children were entering the chicken coop, bending their heads. ‘How dark they are and him so pale!’ The fantasy was cruel, hard on everyone, but it was also clearly interesting to her mother, a spectacle she hadn’t anticipated. She found life immensely surprising, until of course she didn’t. In her cupboards, which had once been full of home baking, chutneys, bottles of preserved fruit, there was only white bread, salt, pre-washed potatoes, mayonnaise mix in a packet. They discovered she was only eating things that were white in colour because of the dangers of what she called pigmentated food. Someone was telling her about this, a man she described as having a silken beard, bare feet and a stopwatch around his neck. Naturally no such figure existed in Naenae. She didn’t speak boastfully about this phantom, but shyly, with a strange girlish smile on her face.

Was this what Teresa had coming? But then again, she didn’t have a voice in her head, she had a voice in her voice.

She typed back to Pip, who was not online: Dear African Night Owl, all is fine. Teresa sent it before she realised she’d not replied to the line about Palmerston North. Her cousin would want something witty back, that was their style. She looked at the screen. No wit was in her, only a pressure at her temple, like a thumb. She went back into the bedroom and dressed quickly, as if something depended on it. Why wasn’t there time for a shower? She put on deodorant. She had an urgent sense that she needed to be ready.

Although she had no appetite, she poured yoghurt onto cereal, chopping half a banana on top. For the time it took to eat this, through an old trick, she prevented herself from thinking. You imagined a white wall being painted, white on white. An odourless paint. The painting was important—the even sweep of
the roller—otherwise you began to see writing, which led back to thoughts. She held it. In this blank space she hoped to return her mind to its normal routines, shaking off the foreignness that was only some ephemeral condition, the smudge that sleep had made of reality. Was she even properly awake? Then she couldn’t hold it any longer. And the banana tasted like a banana and the yoghurt she poured in was wet and cold. There was instantly something grassy on her palate.

Once in Lower Hutt on High Street she’d been approached by a woman in her sixties wearing a tee-shirt that said across the chest: AIRBAG inflation on impact. Incredibly, the woman, it turned out, was from France. She was nice, very polite, cultured, with perfect wavy white hair. Her handbag carried exquisite scrollwork on its strap, the body of the bag kept elegantly plain. Could Teresa tell her where the art gallery was? They’d walked to the Dowse together, stopping to name the trees, admiring the fountain. Fontaine, she said. She loved the montagnes. Willow, said Teresa, pointing. Weeping Willow. The woman tried it and then they both laughed.