Somebody Loves Us All (31 page)

‘We looked at our bikes with their loaded panniers. “They’ve got all our stuff on them,” I said croakily. “Won’t work because it’s our gear.”

‘Duncan looked at me with a slightly open mouth. Then he moved to the back of Teresa’s bike and flicked at the buckles on the straps that secured the panniers to the frame. “Take two seconds to get those off, Pip. I’m not going to bike off with your things, if you think that. You’ve got my car back here! You’ve got Ginny!”

‘At the mention of her name, the woman shifted slightly in her seat, glancing out at us. It was unclear how much of the conversation she’d heard. She appeared completely hostile to the entire scenario as if she might have preferred us never to have stopped and that somehow it was our fault they were there.
Maybe they’d had a fight about running out of petrol and she was sulking.

‘“Where,” I said, “where are you two going? Eventually.”

‘Again Duncan shot me the look before speaking. I was very irritating to him but he needed to replace any aggression with his carefully casual tone. That was what I thought. This time he also gave the impression that he was buying time to think of a fact that would be silencing, something to shut me up. He couldn’t do it. He didn’t know where he was going or he didn’t want to tell me. He turned and looked down the road, gesturing with an arm. “Through the way you came, Pip,” he said vaguely.

‘He rested his hand on Teresa’s panniers. “Of course it’s an imposition, I know. You girls have had a tough day’s biking, my goodness. The last thing you need is the day to get any longer. Right, Pip? Listen, I told Ginny we can walk back. It’s about five miles. Or I can walk back, do the round trip. But she doesn’t want to be left out here in the dark is what she says. Doesn’t like the trees apparently. She’s not from round here, you know.”

‘All three of us looked at the pines above us, the furry branches shifting slightly at their tips, darkening as they thickened closer to the trunk.

‘“Why don’t you both walk back together,” said Teresa, “then get a lift, hitchhike or something back to the car with the petrol?”

‘“Hitch?” said Duncan. “But there’s no one about.”

‘“Or just wait till tomorrow morning?” I said. “Both walk back to town, then come back out here tomorrow and start again?”

‘“That’s a good idea!” said Teresa.

‘Duncan looked at us both, still smiling, scratching his head. “These are good ideas, girls, and I’d be a starter for any of them, only Ginny can’t really walk anywhere at present.”

‘“Why?” I said. It wasn’t boldness I felt but the recklessness of disbelief. The idea that the woman couldn’t walk was so outrageous to us, that he’d offer such a weak excuse, it was incredible.

‘“Hurt her foot.”

‘“Really?” I said, openly dismissive.

‘Duncan called to the car that Ginny should show us her foot. At first she didn’t respond but Duncan asked again with a sudden harshness in his voice, and with difficulty she raised a foot, which we saw was in plaster. She lowered it again unhappily.

‘We all stood in silence for a few moments. A big bird, a wood pigeon, came out of a tree nearby in lumbering flight, sending a trail of debris spinning in the night air down to the road. The sudden sound of the bird made me duck my head. I had a taste in my mouth from those dry dry needles simply by watching them rain. A few fell on the car roof. I had a strong and upsetting image of the vehicle eventually being covered over, buried by the forest litter, sinking into the earth in some undiscoverable patch inside the band of pines.

‘He was telling the truth.

‘The foot in plaster was a bitter defeat for us. It threw everything into doubt again. By how much had we misjudged this pair? It was an odd sort of shame we felt. We’d met the first real test the world had sent us and having studied it, considered it, here was the result: we’d failed. It
was
a test too. I knew at once this was the reason we’d come on the trip, to face this, the car by the side of the empty road at night with its human questions. And what had happened? Faced with a man’s story, we’d put in place of its ordinary reality a schoolgirl fantasy of evil intentions. We’d imagined all sorts of unnameable horror. Things buried.

‘Duncan and Ginny had run out of petrol, didn’t we get it? Now we did. Teresa had already stepped off her bike and was unlacing her panniers. Duncan was helping her, kneeling at her back wheel.

‘“How did she do that?” I said. “Get the cast on her foot?”

‘The man didn’t look up. “Tripped.”

‘I looked over to the woman in the car and our eyes met for the first time. In that instant everything changed, or changed
back. In place of the cold hostility she’d been showing us, there was now a pleading sort of look, a quick terror of her own, pure alarm. She was begging for help or sending a warning or both. Her eyes widened with it. She showed me this for only a moment, while Duncan had his back to her. When he stood up again, taking the bike from Teresa, the woman slumped down in her seat and resumed staring out the front window of the car.

‘I was staring at the ground, unable to meet either Teresa’s eye or to look at the man who was now adjusting her seat to his height. He made some joke about his legs being longer than ours but not as pretty, and I heard Teresa’s dutiful laugh. She sounded strange, unwell.

‘I heard him speak though I was unaware he was asking me a question. He repeated it. “Will you ride with me, Pip?”

‘“Me?”

‘He explained that I could stay in town once we’d reached it. He would bike back with the petrol, then rope Teresa’s bike to the back of the car and drive her into town before setting off on their own trip. The car could only take one bike, he said. The rope was too short and weak for both.

‘I found it hard to follow any of this reasoning. Ropes? The word made me feel ill. I only knew that we had to stay together. That was our only hope. Two against one, possibly three against one though the woman was not to be counted on, her fear was so complete she might not be able to do anything when it came time for it. She was trapped in the car, trapped in her terror, but I had no idea about her loyalty.

‘“Can’t,” I said.

‘“No!” said Teresa harshly, as if suddenly waking again into her buried fright.

‘“Why not?”

‘“My father told me not to bike with strange men,” I said.

‘He laughed loudly and briefly at this, then he was earnest. “If we don’t do it this way, it’ll be pitch black and very late by the time you girls reach town. You don’t even have lights on
these bikes. Do you have food? Maybe a dry biscuit or two but not dinner.”

‘“We had a big lunch at Waiouru,” said Teresa.

‘“We’ll stay here with Ginny and wait for you to get back,” I said. “That’ll be fine. We can sleep somewhere off the road, we’ve been doing that, you know. Then in the morning we can take off again.”

‘He looked from me to Teresa, as if trying to find a crack to slip through, some path to win back the advantage. Finally, he could do nothing except lift his shoulders and drop them, signalling that we were stupid girls who couldn’t be helped. Then he got off the bike, letting it fall roughly to the ground, and went over to talk to the woman.

‘He spoke through her window in a low voice and we couldn’t hear what he was saying. She didn’t look at him as he spoke but kept her head still, fixing her gaze on the road back to town.

‘He went around to the boot of the car and took out a can and a long length of plastic hosing. He tied this around his waist.

‘He came back, picked up the bike, loathing for it written all over his face and got on it. Then he said to us in a voice of sternness, “She needs to rest. Her foot in the cast is sore and she’s not feeling great. You girls stay over there and try not to make too much noise.” He pointed to a spot in front of the car. “I’ll be back soon. Don’t go anywhere, don’t wander off, and don’t bother her. Now I’m offering one last chance. Who wants to ride with me and make the whole fucking mess of this night come to a quicker end?” He waited, looking up at the trees. “No? Want the longer version? Frightened of your own shadows, whoever sent you pair out on this adventure had no idea!” He spoke these words with real venom, almost spitting them. His face was mostly in darkness now but you could see little flecks of silver where the saliva flew. Plus he had more for us. “You don’t come with me, you insult me, you think I’m something I’m not but it’s you who fit into that camp. You think you’re grown-up but you’re two kids, scared out of your wits and making everyone else’s life harder as a result. I’ve got one piece of advice. Go
fucking home!” He was breathing heavily from this outburst. We didn’t dare speak. He tightened the strange belt he’d made of the plastic hosing. “Coming? No? Suit yourselves.”

‘We could hardly bear to watch him bike off. We both had our heads down. Finally I looked up and he hadn’t gone very far at all. He was wobbling, trying to get going, surprised by the bike’s weight, as I said he wasn’t a big man, his legs were slight, and it might have looked comical in another situation. I don’t think he’d been on a bike in years. We heard him cursing. Then he disappeared in the gloom.

‘I’m not sure who started first but we both began to cry. We wept as the children he said we were, out of our depth, missing our families, hopeless. We wept as babies.

‘But we also wept as young women, humiliated and terrorised and resisting. Yes, that as well, I think. Hadn’t we sent him away? It was relief and exhaustion that rushed from us, and a kind of immobilising grief for versions of ourselves he’d shredded and yet also a feeling now that we had a future to decide on, if only we could bring ourselves to stop crying.’

Pip stood up and moved to the window that looked down on the alley between their building and the neighbouring one. Paddy stayed sitting.

‘We wept standing in exactly the positions he’d left us in, upright and fixed, as if he watched us still, keeping us in place, as if we knew he could come back at any moment and punish us for even the slightest physical move. It was extraordinary that feeling of stone that was in our feet and legs, that idea of him over us, even though we’d seen him wobbling away on Teresa’s bike. We knew he was gone and we believed he was here. We were forbidden by that presence to touch or console each other. I think it the loneliest I have ever been, Paddy.

‘In the chicken coop, I had the birds. I keep coming back there when I don’t mean to. I think it’s because when I was in the coop, facing all that, I thought a lot about your mother. I’d had a letter from her that very day, always a good day when I got a letter from darling Teresa. And I thought especially of our
famous bike ride up the North Island, though famous only to us. Anyway, in the coop, the birds came to me with curiosity. They knew I was in the wrong place but they came to me. In the forest, I had no one though with an arm I could have reached out and touched your dear mother, whom I loved and loved.

‘These were not silent tears either. We encouraged each other with our misery and we cried loudly, the clear shame of it making us give in more completely to the emotion. It seemed as though nothing could stop us ever. Perhaps when the man came back we would have had enough. He would make us stop. Duncan? I couldn’t stand to have his name in my head, that he even had a name seemed absurd. We howled and howled, statues, howling, inconsolable, the sounds carrying far into the ugly forest.

‘Next something odd happened. We became aware of another person standing between us. I saw the foot in the cast. The woman he’d called Ginny was there! We swallowed our crying almost immediately and looked at her. She stood unsteadily, balancing her weight on her good foot. Feeling herself topple, she reached out and caught our shoulders and we found ourselves joined, the three of us. It was an amazing thing, yet another amazing thing!

‘“We must have a plan,” she said. “I am Genevieve.”’

Pip moved away from the window and came towards him, her eyes alive. ‘Paddy, she was French!’

It was difficult to know what to do with this piece of information. It took Paddy a moment to understand what she’d just said. ‘How strange,’ he said.

‘When your mother came and saw me in Palmerston North, we looked it up on the Internet. People who suddenly take on a foreign accent.’

‘Snap,’ he said.

‘She hadn’t thought of doing that. She was in a state, you know. She thought tumour but she didn’t have any pain as such, no headaches or dizziness even. She was tired. She was tired I think from oversleeping. Anyway, you’ll know it too, that there’s a connection between something that’s happened in the person’s
life and the type of accent they suddenly acquire. I mean, why French?’

‘And you think Genevieve?’

Pip’s story at once seemed both less and more important than he’d thought it was going to be. He didn’t doubt her sincerity and he was grateful to learn about this episode in his mother’s life. Yet a wave of disappointment went through him. This?

Pip had probably armed herself against this response or she might have seen something of it in his features because she immediately nodded, as if agreeing with his thoughts.

‘You’re right!’ she said. ‘Of course you’re right, Paddy. She was French, so what. Yes. Too far-fetched, yes.’ She sat down again opposite him, deflated.

He waited for her to say more, to advance her theory, to convince him of the connections, yet she’d lapsed into silence, her face a blank. No longer animated by her narration, she looked immediately older.

‘Did you talk about this possibility with my mother, this connection with the woman in the forest?’

She shook her head. ‘It occurred to me much later, after she’d gone. She’d already told me about hearing the item on the radio. But to me that sounded so minor and inconsequential. Of course what do I know? Maybe that would be enough. And how anyway does this help?’

They were silent for several more moments.

Of course he also wanted desperately to know how it would all end. Because he didn’t yet know. And maybe this Genevieve had a bigger part to play. ‘But you can’t leave it there,’ he said.

She seemed surprised by this and looked at him with curiosity. Leave what where? Now that her feeling about the French connection had been revealed and made to look weak, did this mean the tale really lacked a point? Of course Pip knew the ending. To her there was no mystery. She was the story’s ending embodied. She sat before him, so obviously they made it out of the forest. What did he want to know?