Somebody Loves Us All (8 page)

‘Sure,’ said Paddy.

‘I could take it now, if you like.’

Paddy agreed.

‘No charge.’ He reached towards the picture, lifted it from its hook with a deft upward motion, and put it under his arm. When he did this, Sam made a quick sighing sound, or a sound of irritation. Had he watched this before? Was it something his father was prone to—walking into strangers’ houses and leaving with the pictures off their walls? Everyone watched Alan straighten the picture hook.

‘No charge? But you’ll give me an invoice.’

‘He won’t give you an invoice,’ said Angela, more sharply than she’d intended since she at once attempted to recover her tone by mumbling something else about the smallness of the job. It would take Alan minutes. The flicker of annoyance here seemed directed at no one in particular or at everyone. Was she simply thinking of the bigger task they were handing Paddy and that it didn’t seem a fair swap? The difference was Paddy was charging them ninety-five dollars an hour.

Again from their son came the short breath of displeasure, more like a pant this time. When Paddy looked at him, however,
there was nothing on his face but perfect tight blankness.

And no one had commented on the content of the cartoon, the caricature of Paddy done some years before but recognisable. Perhaps not. They’re leaving with me, he thought. It was not an existential moment. Strange to see his picture exit the apartment though. He seemed to have had no control over it happening. Alan Covenay would have got his picture no matter what Paddy said.

And then the picture didn’t come back and so much time had gone by that Paddy had begun to think it was now appropriate for the repaired picture to arrive at the conclusion of the therapy. He would give them back their son and they’d return him to him, as it were.

He was that stuck. And he had the bike to prove it.

He’d told Helena about Sam one night in bed. ‘If he puts his fist through a window at school or pushes his mother against a wall, I could refer him to Lant.’

‘Do you think that’s likely?’ said Helena. She was reading
People
magazine. She had a stack of them in her bedside cupboard. Trash relaxed her and he wasn’t to scoff. Nor was her pleasure ironic. Dora gave the magazines to her after she’d finished with them. It was a vital and ritualistic connection between mother and daughter. They bonded here. Whatever was fraught and difficult and shifting between them seemed insignificant, soluble almost when they regarded the star system, its eternal dilemmas, its alcoholism, its abandoned love children, its surgeries. The relentless sinking of hope. They were briefly lifted. It also meant Helena was free to talk with him while still reading. As she’d pointed out, were she ever to open the 700-page journal of Christa Wolf which Paddy had given her for her birthday in a burst of highbrow Germanic fervour shortly after they got together and which delighted her so much she kept it permanently beside the bed, then all conversation would have to stop.

Sometimes, to prove this, she opened the book at random and read a sentence in German aloud to him. It was like being in bed with someone else.

‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘It’s possible. I feel so useless with this kid. He sits there in a black heap of unresponsiveness and occasionally I make stupid statements which hang in the room.’

‘But he likes coming and his parents support it.’

‘They might just be clutching at straws.’

‘You’re the best straw there is,’ said Helena. She’d turned the magazine towards the light better to examine someone’s unwanted pregnancy. Paddy could read the headline from his side. Helena studied the photo, shaking her head. Did she believe the pregnancy or not? Often Paddy looked at the
People
pictures, lying beside Helena. Even though she’d assured him the candid photos were mostly set up by the stars’ agents, the furtiveness of the famous carried a charge. As they ‘rushed’ from restaurants where they’d been ‘spotted’ or made ‘flying visits’ to ‘anonymous’ suburban shopping malls in big hats and glasses and wigs, their hauntedness seemed real rather than performed. After all, these were not, as a rule, great actors. They couldn’t pretend all that well, could they. ‘That’s very kind of you,’ he said. ‘I could use that in my advertising. “Looking to clutch at a straw? Ring Patrick Thompson.”’

‘You don’t advertise,’ said Helena. ‘Jeremy Lanting seems premature to me anyway.’

‘Fine, you might be right.’

She flicked over another page. Paddy read the words ‘Rehab Horror’. The thought didn’t flow directly but it came nevertheless. To what extent could it be said that Sam was acting? He came to the sessions so that Paddy could be his audience. ‘Can I ask you one other thing, unrelated,’ he said. ‘What part of your body do you prefer not to show?’ He was thinking of Sam’s mother mostly, of Sam too, Bridget and her ears, but also the general furtiveness of the human race. He was not excluded.

For some reason he was also thinking about the tree full of young tui they’d come across on their walk in Mount Victoria.
That was the opposite, wasn’t it. Where you expected hiding, you got display. There was a performance angle, though the birds seemed unaware of being watched, if that were possible. Often a bird’s life had figured as a mind-bendingly anxious business, alertness without rest, the flicking head, the almost ceaseless flight from predation. He was taking as his sample the birds around them, in the city and the hills. No doubt his theory was garbage when you considered—what? Some long-legged creature, wading on a beach at sunset. He didn’t know names. Or an albatross. Anyway, birds had never seemed to him strongly connected with beauty. Careworn, he thought. Small engines of fright, who, when they stopped in trees to recharge, were still charged. They were always plugged in to a current of crisis. They darted around, thinking what next, what next? It was terrible they had to know the present was over, the future was dire. Except these tui.

Helena put down the magazine. For this, she needed all her attention. ‘What part of my body do I prefer not to show? To whom? Give me a context.’

‘No, it doesn’t matter. Perhaps when you look in the mirror.’

‘Easy, my neck.’

‘Your neck? What’s wrong with it?’

‘Come on.’ She touched it as if it were sunburned.

‘No, really, I don’t know what you’re talking about. Your neck looks fine to me.’

‘Hey, I’m its owner.’

‘One careful lady owner,’ he said.

‘As is where is. Some wear and tear. Highly motivated vendor.’

‘Can the buyer collect? Because I’m interested.’ Paddy ran the backs of his fingers down from her ear to her shoulder. ‘I love your neck.’ She closed her eyes and smiled. ‘See?’ he said. ‘Whatever’s the problem here?’

‘Stroke it and it says, “I like that.” I mean, it works fine as nerve endings, as pleasure centre. As a stand-alone neck, it’s a
disaster. It leaves my shoulders from the wrong place.’

‘From here?’ He gently kneaded her left shoulder with his knuckles.

‘You make a good case for it.’

‘As pleasure centre.’

‘Right.’ She gave a loud moan of delight, only half-faked. ‘So much tension. Stupid work. Helena hating the school.’

‘No, it’s temporary, the school, I mean.’

‘Temporary for now, yes. But next time? Probably this is the future too.’

He thought about her success, none of it assured, in total admiration. Having returned in a hurry from Germany in the wake of a nasty split from Max, and needing anything to keep going, she’d become a part-time gardener for a landscaping firm while her daughter was in school. Her CV was the very imprint of will-power. She’d started organising the staff roster and had then discovered a talent for business management. From there she’d managed a café in a garden centre, then a horticultural wholesaler where she bought an interest in the company with money she got after her father died.

There was all that German literature,
The Magic Mountain
and the verse dramas, but she insisted it was by chance she’d moved from plants back to words.

She’d once had a contract to provide indoor plants to businesses—dentists, lawyers, banks, and a language school. She’d struck up a friendship with the director of the school, also a Germanist, who was about to retire. He offered her friendly terms to buy into the franchise. Now the language school was part of a national network in which she had a financial interest and she was on the board of the governing body. The vital connecting strand throughout these moves was an instinct for investment. Helena had always made sure of something more than salary.

She claimed to have had a lot of luck and to have known good people but she was the person good people wanted to know, that was itself a singular gift. Yes, the future probably did look like
this: a bad back, the chewing of grey biscuits, rising at night as if being murdered in her sleep. Yet she loved her school and was proud of it and would never give it up.

Paddy had met her when he was invited to give a seminar for Helena’s staff based on a series of his ‘Speech Marks’ columns. These had dealt with English as a second language from mainly a physiological perspective. The title of the seminar was ‘I Can’t Get My Tongue Around It’. Naturally, this was always mentioned in the story of their courtship.

He continued his one-hand massage. She turned towards him and they kissed, the
People
crackling between them. He moved his lips to her neck.

‘You don’t have to keep kissing it,’ she said. ‘There are other places, you know.’

One thing with Helena he always marvelled at was that sex was normal, without being attached to an idea which announced smugly, this is normal, get over it. He knew from her German days she was used to nakedness. Swimming naked in lakes et cetera. And she was ahead of him in this. But it hadn’t become dogma. Clothes were good too. Once he referred to her magic mons, and she laughed but there was no question of this sticking, or becoming the starter in a private jokey vocabulary. She inspired him somehow with sex. She was extremely attentive and nothing was dutiful. This was modelling of a very high order. She let him see straightforwardly how sex enhanced her mood, her spirit. Its effects could belong in the realm of ordinary life, and not be confined to the near-dark, or comic release. Once you got over your shame at the woeful inadequacies of the CV you carried there, you felt waves of gratitude for learning this! A torrent of humble joy! He remembered telling her he still felt that it was a bit flattering from the male point of view to be involved in the female orgasm. She shouldn’t take this the wrong way but there wasn’t much to do. He was laughing as he spoke. Great to watch though, she said. Always, he said. And I could say the same thing about the male orgasm, she said. They talked about penetration, which
seemed to him to change the rules, involving her in ways that were, um, inescapable. But clitoral stimulation, she said, didn’t feel ‘outside’. I’m in a pretty extraordinary space, almost like a house, when that happens. There’s a, don’t laugh, a staircase, a bunch of steps I go up. Thank god I don’t recognise it as any place, not my family home or anything. Stairway to heaven, he said. Now that would be flattering yourself, she said. It was the sort of disquisition he’d never had before. Solo’s not the same, he told her. Ditto, she said.

She said, why do we say he
performed
oral sex on her? You perform Gilbert and Sullivan. Does one expect applause having done it?

I feel like clapping, he said.

‘We’re done,’ he told Sam, with a sharp snap of his hands on the desk.

The boy flinched at the noise. Paddy had never done this before and he regretted the cheap trick of it at once. Stupid to try and scare them out of hiding. He thought of Lant’s advice of pulling the boy up by the ear. ‘Same time next week.’

Then in one fluid movement Sam wheeled off the chair and was out the door of the office. When Paddy reached the front door, Sam was there waiting for him to open it, a bit like a dog looking to get outside. It was part of the regime that Paddy controlled entrance and egress. Sam was catching a bus home today because Angela was busy—she’d phoned before the session. They were standing near the bike.

Paddy couldn’t finish like this.

They were both aware that this session had been marked by something new and not altogether pleasant on Paddy’s part: aggression, a weird current of malice. Chill. ‘I might go for a ride later,’ said Paddy, his hand on the doorknob. It was untrue. He needed Lant with him. He was still self-conscious in his shorts and his shirt and his jacket on those trembling, thin rims. In his shiny blue helmet. Then there were shoes that clipped directly
onto the pedals. These could prove a special humiliation.

Upright it was more difficult for the boy to hide himself. He had his father’s height. His features were smudged though. The acne was so inflamed as to present almost a second mouth. They’d tried dermatologists, medication. His lips bulged slightly with the concealed architecture. He looked quickly in the direction of the bike, then back again at the door. The action was accompanied by a sound somewhere between a cough and a laugh. A flash of braces. It was easy to imagine his contempt for Paddy and his bike. ‘See you then, Sam.’ Paddy opened the door and he ducked through it, passing so close to Paddy in his hurry that their shoulders touched.

Paddy watched him scoot off down the corridor in the direction of the stairs. He wouldn’t take the lift since that meant further confinement, the possibility of human interaction. Sam Covenay was a shifty dark person, moving erratically. Flight aged him, filled him in. Had one of their neighbours opened his or her door at that moment it would have been to guess that a middle-aged homeless man was loose in the building. He was someone to be reported.

Then it occurred to Paddy something might have just happened a few seconds before. Sam had engineered the physical contact at the door. There’d been room to get by him. Paddy had stepped back to allow him a safe exit, that is, one without collision, without touch. But the boy had carefully, accidentally, made sure of this connection. He’d not barged Paddy either. He’d brushed him, a delicate action.