Somebody Loves Us All (35 page)

‘Then someone from the school comes forward and he speaks with the prime minister. There’s a little stage set up near the cars, with a microphone for the speeches. But Mugabe doesn’t walk there. He goes to the edge of the running track, and then he sees this bike that’s lying on the grass, maybe a teacher’s bike, I don’t know. Did someone leave it there especially? Did one of his aides bring it and place it there? No one knows whose bike it was. Afterwards, many claimed it of course. Anyway, he picks it up, looks at it for a moment, and then he gets on it. Robert Mugabe on a bicycle! When he was young he would have had a bike of course but that was some time ago, you know.’

‘I know the feeling,’ said Paddy.

‘He wobbles quite a bit too, getting going. He can’t do it at first and he has to put his foot down. Finally he’s riding. But then he does a circuit of the school track, dressed in a suit and tie. One of the most extraordinary things I’ve ever seen, Paddy.

‘Slowly he bikes around in front of us, still smiling. It’s a terrible smile, I think. All around the field there’s this great hush now, the applause and everything has just died away completely. No one can believe it, what are we seeing? He looked so strange.

‘We should have cheered and laughed, but people were afraid. Suddenly you knew everyone was terrified.

‘And you know what? Never once did his hands leave the handlebars. He didn’t wave, he didn’t lift a finger off the grip he had to acknowledge us. How could he? He was concentrating with all his might on not falling off. He went very slowly and at the end of his circuit, his aides surrounded him, and he biked sort of into them, again in slow motion, all of us frightened, and they caught him, he simply crashed into them and they held him, and we never got to see Mugabe get off the bike, thank goodness.’

‘What were you afraid of?’ said Paddy.

‘I don’t know. Perhaps only that we’d seen it.’

‘Seen something you shouldn’t have?’

‘Of course.’ She shifted her briefcase into the other hand. ‘For a second, you see, he had no power. We had the power. We had the power.’

After Pip left, he phoned Helena. ‘How’s my Janet Frame?’ he said. For a moment she didn’t get the reference. ‘Running from the room? Running into the trees?’ No, she said she was still there, hanging in. He asked about morning tea and Helena said that in some serendipitous way, having in her haste bought a gluten-free cake at Moore Wilson’s, Trish Gibbons turned out to be wait for it gluten intolerant. ‘We put the cake in front of her
and she said sadly, “I don’t know if I can eat that.” Oh, I could have kissed her!’

A thing like that, he told her, could have an incalculable effect.

Trish was also, Helena said, from the South Island, from near Bannockburn, so they’d talked over lunch about their dream of retiring down there, building a place. Soon they were swapping ideas on heating, wood pellets versus log burner, waste water systems, whatever. ‘Incredible,’ he said, telling her about the lunch conversation he’d had with Pip, the same topic of their retirement coming up. He felt his optimism begin to return. The lunch had been misery. Teresa was a worry. He was unhappy with his own selfishness. But simply by talking to Helena, he felt better. It was a wonder. He had images of them reading in front of large double-glazed panorama-giving windows. The underfloor heating, heating stones. Snow on the ranges. No doubt he was attracted to it right then because of the promise of escape. It was ten or fifteen years away! Helena already knew quite a bit about septic tanks and even this aspect of their grand plan was thoroughly exciting, romantic. In the space of a year, from when the idea first came, the self-sufficiency angle had already moved in his mind from impossible to daunting to invigorating, and this was fully down to Helena’s range of skills. She’d do the landscaping. The garden could grow most of their food. She admitted she could use a rifle. She was some sort of über frontier woman. He could be a worker, a worker bee. And they’d be surprisingly sexual. Otherwise, he’d told her, he wasn’t interested. Ditto, she said. They wouldn’t have neighbours.

On the phone, when she asked about Teresa, he fudged it a little. He was sparing Helena the gory details because why bother her now, on her day of days. Also he was tired of his mother. Then Helena had to go. ‘But things are looking okay there?’ he said.

‘It’s a damn good school, Paddy,’ she said.

He was working in his office, finalising exit notes for a couple of his patients, when he heard a voice from upstairs. His mother had woken up and was testing how she sounded. He walked quietly to the bottom of the stairs and listened but she’d already stopped. He heard her go into the bathroom, the water running, and then he went back into his office.

Teresa appeared at his door a few minutes later, not looking groggy at all, though the edges of her hair were wet from where she’d washed her face. She asked about Pip and he told her about the trip to the lawyer.

‘Poor old Pip,’ she said. ‘She can stay with me. When do we go to the hospital again?’ There wasn’t a trace of the aggression she’d shown at lunch.

‘Tomorrow,’ he said.

‘I don’t want to go.’ She’d spoken evenly, a flat declaration.

‘I think it would be a good idea to have the scan.’

‘I don’t feel anything any more. My head feels normal. I think I’m going to be all right. Tomorrow is my day with the girls. I’m booked.’

All her r’s were guttural, the uvula giving its series of taps as the larynx vibrated and the back of her tongue rose towards the soft palate. With effort he prevented himself from staring at this hidden miracle. He had to get used to it. ‘I’m sure Steph will understand.’

‘It’s a real nuisance, Paddy.’ She smiled at him. ‘I bet you’re cursing the day you told me the place next door was for sale.’

‘With neighbours, it’s all luck, isn’t it.’ He stood up to open the front door for her. ‘I think it’s very cool having a French mother.’

‘Cool? The word seems too young for you, Paddy. Cool.’

He kissed her lightly on the cheek. Her skin was dry, vaguely powdery, impossibly soft, velvety, and for a moment he rested his own cheek against hers. She let him do this. They’d not touched much. It was for Stephanie to kiss and hold their mother, to rub the back of her hand, to feel the lined and pale instep of her bare foot—he’d watched this the previous summer, when Teresa was
complaining of the pinch of a new pair of sandals. Somehow Stephanie had always had this job, this right. She’d held a finger down just below their mother’s ankle. ‘It’s your pulse! Look, your life-source,’ she said. Then she’d quickly taken her finger off. ‘Don’t really like to know that.’

He couldn’t sleep. Helena shifted slightly beside him as he got out of bed but she didn’t wake up. They’d finished a bottle of wine between them, which was more than they usually drank. This was by way of a mini-celebration. As far as anyone could tell, the day with Trish Gibbons had gone off smoothly, amicably, though the word ‘successful’ was banned. There were no on-the-spot results and Helena had of course not been present when the interviews of students, past and present, were taking place. But unless Trish was especially duplicitous and tricky, and there’d been some left-field report from a previously silent complainer, Helena thought her school would come out okay. Now she was tired in an altogether new way, relief-tired, and she’d fallen asleep on the sofa, more or less in the middle of a conversation. He’d had to wake her to get her to the bedroom. He helped her take off her shoes and her clothes. She slurred at him. Touching her body, he felt something that must have been close to what he’d read described as a twinge of sadness. It occurred in his penis. So that’s what they meant!

He went into his office and tried to read a book but his concentration wasn’t there. He read Julie’s poem again. He thought, I’ll put this on the wall instead of the missing cartoon portrait. This is much better. He put a coat over his boxer shorts and teeshirt and left the apartment barefoot. He stopped outside his mother’s door, and then, hearing nothing, walked along the corridor in the direction of the lift. It was just after 11pm. He considered going for a bike ride but his gear was in the bedroom and the noise might wake Helena. There was an unreleased energy in him, something spring-loaded. It wasn’t wholly connected with his sleeping beauty.

He was just turning at the end of the corridor, to head back to the apartment, when the doors of the lift opened and Geoff Harley stepped out. He was carrying a solid black case, a little like something used for musical instruments, brass perhaps. It was Thursday night. Geoff’s mystery outing. He’d moved a step back at first, trying to take in Paddy’s form. The corridor was dimly lit. The lift door closed on his case and he pulled it free, the doors opening and shutting again.

‘Hello, Geoff. Sorry for creeping around, couldn’t sleep.’

‘Thought I was going to be mugged for a second there, Paddy. You almost got this swung at your privates.’ He held up the case. ‘The lift saved you an injury. Are
you
worried about the people in the alley?’

‘The drug dealers? Life’s rich tapestry I think. Until they mug me. So far so good.’ He gestured towards the case. ‘Do you play?’

‘Play? Yes, I do. Though not quite what you think.’

Paddy had started to move off. ‘Okay. Well, good night.’

‘Is your mother well? I hope she’s better.’

Paddy turned back. He said she was and he thanked him for bringing her to the apartment. ‘It all went a bit crazy for a while. But we’re sorted now.’

‘I’m so glad to hear that. No problem.’ Geoff Harley stood in the same spot, waiting for something. This was what he wanted in exchange for helping his mother, curiosity about his own life. In the stories Paddy and Helena had invented to explain these Thursdays, Geoff Harley was a Mason attending lodge meetings, a preacher in some small evangelical church, a card-player off to a back room filled with other architects, the father of an illegitimate child who had secret assignations, which was why his wife couldn’t know.

They’d not seen the black case except from a distance—once they’d come out of their apartment as Geoff was disappearing into the lift. He was some sort of doctor in an occult medicine.

‘My guess is the trumpet,’ said Paddy, motioning towards the case.

‘Sorry,’ said Geoff, smiling.

‘Clarinet? I don’t know.’

‘Barking up the wrong tree, I’m afraid.’

He wanted this curiosity endlessly deferred, toyed with, extended.

‘You carry a gun in there.’

‘Ha!’

‘A pool cue, with screw-in parts.’

‘Used to play at my uncle’s place, but no.’

‘Some sort of equipment for measuring the light coming off buildings at night.’

‘Oh, it’s not work in here, believe me. No.’

Paddy smiled. Geoff Harley was Sam Covenay’s inverse image, the speaker who wanted it never to end. ‘So nothing medical? A stethoscope? Instruments of torture?’

‘I love this! Torture?’

‘Okay, okay. There’s nothing in there at all, Geoff, you walk around for three hours pretending you have something in there so people think you’re a mysterious person but really the thing is empty.’

Geoff touched his chin with a finger pensively. ‘Mmm, I quite like that notion.’

They stood in the gloom of the corridor, a wave of tiredness finally passing through Paddy. Immediately he felt sluggish, weak, ready for sleep. ‘Will you show me?’ he said.

Geoff placed the case on the floor and flicked open the silver latches. ‘I warn you, this is something that Rebecca, for instance, finds rather objectionable. You might too. Maybe I shouldn’t show you.’ He looked up at Paddy, seeming to notice for the first time the coat, his bare feet. ‘How often do you walk these corridors at night?’

‘Never. First time.’

‘Okay. I was just wondering whether I was missing out on something.’

‘Nope.’

He lifted the lid of the case and shifted it around so that
Paddy could see inside. There were four compartments. In one of them was some sort of electrical transformer, with a cord and plug. Another held a console with dials and switches, and the other two contained toy cars, about eight inches long, fitted into cushioned slots, their sides visible.

‘I can see Rebecca’s point,’ said Paddy.

‘You understand now?’

‘Yes, I do.’ Paddy bent down on his haunches. He was side by side with Geoff, looking into the case. ‘May I?’

‘Let me,’ said Geoff. He gently pulled at one of the cars and it came out of its slot. He handed it to Paddy with some care.

It was heavier than he expected, solid, the body metal, the little tyres appeared to be rubber, not plastic. The blue and gold paintwork shiny and thick, enamel. Expensive, no doubt. Crafted. Obsessed over. He was aware that Geoff was studying his face, gauging his reaction. It was the sort of look new parents gave you when they agreed you could handle their baby for the first time.

‘Quite heavy, isn’t she?’ said Geoff.

They might have been discussing birth weights. Paddy said, ‘You go to a club of some kind.’

‘A club of some kind.’ Geoff considered this.

‘Maybe you’re even the president of this club.’

‘Ha, not bad. Treasurer in fact.’ He leaned over and touched the roof of the car Paddy held.

The windows of the car were blacked out. ‘You’re a sick man, Harley.’

‘I know, I know. Do you want to see her run?’

‘Of course.’

He removed the console from the case and asked Paddy to place the car on the floor. He moved some switches and then, with his thumb, pressed the central toggle button and the car went forward with slight whirring. He was lining it up. Both men stood up, looking at the car. ‘This won’t be all-out, you understand.’

‘Of course not,’ said Paddy.

‘Don’t want to wake the neighbours.’

‘I am the neighbours.’

‘And your mother, remember she lives here now. Is she French?’

‘Partly.’

‘How wonderful. What a gift for you. Here we are then.’ Geoff fiddled again with the console. He moved his thumb again and the car shot off. It was much faster than Paddy had been expecting and he laughed. The car was already nearing the far end of the corridor, difficult to see from where they were. It stopped just short of the wall. Geoff turned it around with a few deft flicks of his thumb. ‘Naughty me,’ he said. He hit a button and the car’s headlights came on. ‘I don’t know if you want to do this but—’ Geoff lay down on his stomach, the console in front of him. He was looking along the floor in the direction of the car.