Someone was ringing the bell. She sat up at once. If she were quiet, they’d go away. It wasn’t time yet to share her tumour with anyone. That would happen, of course it would. She saw it all. She almost wept then in a gushing pity for herself and for the faces that came to her with utter distinctiveness, the faces of her children and their children, watching her. Her bearing under these gazes would count for everything and she had not yet found the mode for it, for telling another living person she was not going to be one of them for much longer. She did not feel at all solid. They wouldn’t recognise her. She didn’t believe in God. Why not? Because there was too much suffering. But now, as a sufferer, she felt aggrieved at being banished from God’s sight, at doing the banishing.
The bell rang again, longer this time.
She stood up carefully and crept towards it. At this point someone put a key in the lock, the door opened and a girl stepped inside. Was this a drug person, finally come?
‘Oh! God, I’m so sorry! You are here. Sorry! I was ringing and I thought you were out. I’m Medbh.’ She was holding out her hand, smiling. ‘Hello Mrs Thompson.’
But she was too attractive, too nice. Teresa took the girl’s hand. ‘Is it cold outside?’ she said.
‘Sorry?’
‘Cold?’
‘Oh, it’s not bad. I’m just set cold, that’s all. It’s my temperature.’ She was taking off her coat. ‘So you just point me in the right direction. If it’s okay with you, Mrs Thompson, I’ll cook first, clean after. It’s very nice to meet you. Is it okay to come now? It’s all right, yes?’
‘Yes. I’m …’ she found it, the thing she had to say, ‘Thérèse.’ It was the tumour’s name.
The girl studied her for a moment. ‘Hi!’
Then she was following the girl into the kitchen. ‘Tell me some of your favourites. What do you like to eat?’ The girl was opening the fridge and looking in, pulling out the vegetable drawers. She held up the bag of sausages and felt them through the plastic.
Teresa nodded. Yes, those need to be used.
‘I can do that.’
The girl wouldn’t let her go. There was a string of rapid-fire questions about where things were, which Teresa answered by opening drawers, by pointing. There. Finally she crept from the room. She went to the computer and sent Pip a Skype message: Grass is a great evil. I must visit your wonderful city and educate you in our ways. We must mow together. When can I come?
7
He was watching Medbh slice and mince garlic. She chopped an onion. Paddy had offered to help but she’d turned him down. In her hands their knives seemed sharper, more professional. He remembered his time as a hotel worker. One night he was in a party that superglued a spatula to Chef’s hat.
He’d known a Medbh in high school, an exchange student from Dublin, and not one since. Paddy had sat next to her on a school outing and said, ‘Tell me, Medbh, about Van Morrison.’
‘Who?’ she said. ‘Well I hate his music.’ He remembered she always wore lace-up boots that went halfway up her shins. She had a white pair and a red pair. In class she was constantly reaching down to lace them up or unlace them. It exasperated the teachers. The leather was so thin you could see the knobs of her ankles. Obviously she was lying to him. How could anyone not think Astral Weeks a masterpiece? But then again, obviously he was lying in pretending to be interested in her opinion, at least about music.
‘Tell me about Thin Lizzy then,’ he said.
‘Who?’ she said.
‘Thin Lizzy. “The Boys are Back in Town”, you know. They’re Irish. Two of the original members actually played in Them, with Van.’
‘There you go, you know it all, why’d you need me for.’
Why’d you need me for. For some reason the phrase had stuck in Paddy’s mind and he’d made it his goodbye statement at clinic when his client—boy or girl—walked out of the last session feeling, if not completely better, then better by far. And they did. Mostly, mainly, they did feel better, in their mouths, in their minds. Sometimes Paddy got a high five, though he was careful never to initiate. It was speech therapy. But no one made a speech, that was forbidden.
‘You’re a surprisingly good cook for someone involved in the lower reaches of the splatter movie business,’ he said to this current Medbh.
They’d come by Medbh through Dora. Dora and Medbh had been friends from university, were now partners, lovers, artists together. They’d made several short films in which young women, usually played by Medbh and Dora themselves, suffered gory ends while hitchhiking around New Zealand. Helena had given them a series of long-term, interest-free loans. One of the films had been shown at a queer film festival in Sydney, where Dora’s father now lived. The film received a Commended in the Cultural Understanding section of the jury awards. He remembered the day Dora had brought the certificate around to the apartment, tossing it Frisbee-style at her mother. ‘That,’ said Dora, ‘is what you get for a thousand hours of work.’
Helena held the certificate in her hands, her eyes growing moist. ‘Look at this. Look at this.’ Dora might have been seven years old fresh from her first ballet recital.
Dora sniffed. ‘A piece of paper, a pat on the head.’
‘But a pat on the head from important people,’ said Helena.
‘Self-important people.’
‘Congratulations,’ said Paddy.
‘Right,’ she said.
She always rumbled him, even when he was being sincere, which in this instance he wasn’t. He kept it light: ‘Does this mean investors can expect a return?’
Dora gave Paddy a look: who are you again?
Helena flourished the certificate again, waving it to bat away any negativity, and moved to her daughter and kissed her on the cheek.
Then Dora had told her mother not to bend the certificate and had taken it from her. Oh it mattered. There followed bubbles, not inexpensive either. The seven-year-old took three glasses thank you very much.
In the kitchen, Medbh told Paddy, ‘We don’t call it splatter. Other people have labels. Horror. Gore. Sicko. We just make films.’
‘Films in which the female leads are routinely eviscerated and left to die by the roadside. And in which the flagrant disregard for continuity is built into the aesthetic, as is the use of strings of sausages for the victims’ intestines.’
‘I see you’re a fan, Paddy.’
‘I liked your early work.’
‘Muff Must Die?’
‘Was that the one? Anyway, your recent turn to a more political cinema raises questions for me which seem problematic.’
‘Hitch-Dykes?’
‘I’m no good with titles. In this one the two women overcome their assailant and it’s his sausages we see spilled. Quite a reversal, don’t you think?’
Medbh was the fun one in the couple. This was Helena’s own appraisal. She said she hated to admit it but her daughter had chosen to be the difficult one, the moody one, the hostile one. Dora needed Medbh. They all needed Medbh. She finished an onion and when she released her fingers it fell into a million pieces.
‘You’re over-reading us, Paddy. We were just sick of getting that stuff on our clothes, in our hair, everywhere,’ she said. ‘Plus we had a wedding to go to the next day. You shower and shower and it still smells. It was the bloke’s idea. Kill me, he said, why not kill me?’
‘My God it’s a pragmatic art form, isn’t it.’
‘Filmmaking is ninety per cent weather. Scorsese said that.’
‘He’s had some pretty good weather throughout his career.’
She gave a short laugh. The slices of salted eggplant were laid out and sweating on a tray. She bent her head close to the tray, inspecting.
‘What are you doing?’ he said.
‘The moisture that pops out, why can’t we ever see it happen? I mean, they’re not exactly small drops, are they.’ She stood up again. ‘The truth is, Patrick, Dora and I are a bit tired of our cinematic direction.’
‘Y
ou’ve hitchhiked all over New Zealand. You’ve had your throats slit from Kaitaia to Bluff.’
‘Bluff Muff Must Die,’ Medbh said sadly. ‘That would have been a good title.’
‘All that disembowelling, all those sausages.’
She peered into the oven. ‘We’re interested in doing something without talking, no dialogue.’
‘I liked your dialogue. “When will we get there?” “Soon, doll.” “What’s this dirt track? This isn’t the way to Auckland.” “It’s a shortcut.”’
‘We’re interested in silence.’
‘Silent movies. Of course that’s been done. But how would the women tell the men who pick them up where they’re heading? Would they use sign language? Deaf women getting murdered?’
‘No more hitch dykes.’
‘Big change.’
‘Actually it’s how we got to know about Sam, the boy who doesn’t talk. We were with Helena the other week and telling her about our idea.’
‘The idea of silence.’
‘Right. So it came up then. I guess we were brainstorming. Dora said, Most of our time in real life is spent not talking. We sit at a desk, we chop an onion, we walk home.’
‘You’re chopping an onion and talking.’
‘Because you’re here. By myself, I wouldn’t. I won’t be saying much on the way home either. I’ll sit on the bus, not saying anything. I’ll look at all the people on the bus and on the streets, not speaking.’
‘Except on their mobile phones.’
‘Would you please be quiet?’
‘I’ll be silent.’
‘But go to a film and you hear all this talk. Why is that? So then Helena must have mentioned this person you’re seeing. Dora thought it was really interesting. Sam became something of a hero, an example anyway.’
‘You know you’re in danger of stepping on my toes here. If we’re talking about Sam, and we’re not because that’s patient confidentiality but a case such as Sam’s, a theoretical boy called theoretically Sam, if he’s the subject, I kind of want that Sam to talk and so do his parents and his teachers and the world. And so does he.’
‘You know that for sure? That Sam, theoretical Sam, wants to?’
‘I know he’s not happy currently.’
‘Talking will bring him happiness?’
‘Talking is something he used to enjoy—I know that, I’ve seen that. The family gave me videos, photos. For some reason he doesn’t do it any more. I think that’s worth finding out about.’
‘Silence is worth finding out about, yes!’
‘But Sam’s no monk with a vow. You don’t look into his eyes and see pools of contentment, the unsayable mysteries of the universe. He won’t let you look in his eyes. He’s too frightened. A hero? I banged my hands on the desk this morning and he jumped out of his skin. And that was private information. Not to be repeated.’
‘Of course.’ Medbh gazed at him.
‘It’s not an approved treatment method, banging the desk,’ he said. ‘Probably I was a bit frustrated.’ Already he’d said too much.
Medbh was also the beautiful one. Dark hair, alert eyes behind her fringe, a graceful poise in her limbs. He’d seen her die a few times. Dora—fair, somewhat bland and open in her face, solid-bodied, all attributes of her father—loved killing her. Medbh had an astonishingly even temperament. As such, she was lousy at being mutilated. She seemed to lie back and take it with complete equanimity. The man came at her with an axe or a spade or a weed eater—whatever he had in the back of his ute—and she looked as if she’d been promised a massage. She screamed a bit but her eyes were basically welcoming. That feels good, now lower, that’s it. Her accession to the indecencies she suffered on-screen presented, Paddy supposed, exactly the difficult subtext required by a certain sector of viewers. He knew from Dora, however, that this was simply a result of a failure in the performance. Medbh was too good-natured for the role. In the outtakes—they’d had evenings of outtakes at the apartment—they could hear Dora, directing, asking for more horror, more fear, more pain. Sometimes Medbh laughed audibly when she was stabbed.
‘God, you have a great job, Patrick,’ she said. She appeared utterly sincere. ‘Helena told us you were like one of the top speech people for kids.’
‘Well, we don’t get ranked. There’s not a league table where we go head to head against one another.’
‘No but you make a difference. You get them to talk, these difficult cases.’
‘I’m not a child-whisperer,’ he said. ‘The kids I see don’t hear me and just agree. Look at Sam. Plus I like silence too. Don’t get me wrong. It has its place.’
‘When do you like it?’
The question took him by surprise. This was a quality both Medbh and Dora had, a directness, a sheen of self-possession and confidence in the presence of people older than themselves. A conviction that they would and should be taken seriously. This was new, he thought. For his generation the idea was not to be taken seriously by anyone. ‘When? I don’t know. Watching a sunset. That for me is a silent moment. You don’t need talk to complete it, right? You sit there with your mouth open.’
‘What else?’
‘Fishing.’
‘Fishing?’
‘Fishing on a still lake.’ There were real memories tied up here though he hadn’t been fishing for years. They’d had a holiday at Taupo. His father had taken him and Margie out one evening in the little boat; Steph would have been a baby. ‘That’s silence like a held breath, isn’t it.’
‘Until you catch something, then all hell breaks loose. I fished with my uncles in the Sounds.’
‘But I never make the mistake of catching anything.’
On Lake Taupo they’d fished for an hour or more, he and Margie, while their father trailed his hand in the water and baited their hooks. Between baitings, their father closed his eyes. It was intensely quiet and the hush and the sight of him with his eyes closed encouraged them reluctantly to give up speech, to listen to the water lapping against the side of the boat and the birds lifting out of trees by the shore. They got bites and when they pulled in their lines the bait was always gone. The nibbles kept them interested, and the exotic peacefulness of the lake almost persuaded them of the value of this moment. They had an inkling of adult melancholy that was not wholly repellent, he thought. Even Margie was prepared to tolerate it for a time.
But there was something wrong with their father’s method of baiting the hooks, perhaps even a deliberate incompetence. Should they actually catch a fish, this atmosphere would be spoiled. There would be a life in the boat that needed to be ended and suddenly he couldn’t imagine his father having a part in that.
Paddy grew desperate to do the hooks himself but he couldn’t bring himself to ask. Margie too had begun to suffer. In the car driving to the lake, they’d already argued about the best place to stick the knife in a flapping fish, and where exactly was the brain? What right had their father to impose himself so languidly on their needs? They swapped looks: you say it! Yet they continued to bob up and down in the stillness.
At a certain point Paddy saw Margie quietly lift her line out; the hook was bare again. Instead of reeling in and moving the hook over to their father, rousing him with a few drops of water falling from the line on to his arm, she let the sinker drop soundlessly back into the lake.
His sister sat in dumb fury, turned away from Paddy, while their father continued in his trance. Suddenly she stood up and threw the whole rod into the lake, shrieking as she did so, and wobbling the boat. Their father gripped the sides; he was totally disorientated. ‘What’s happening? Margie! Your rod!’
‘I got a huge bite!’ she said.
‘My God!’
‘And it just snatched the thing clean out of my hands!’
‘Were you holding it properly?’
‘I was, I was!’ She started to cry.
‘Okay, okay, never mind. We can easily get the rod. Don’t cry now. No big fuss.’
&nb
sp; ‘But you said I wasn’t doing it properly and I was.’
The boat was still rocking. Margie stamped her foot in the boat. It made a useless hollow sound and she tried again without much improvement. A boat on a lake was not a floor. She was utterly estranged from the normal apparatus of her temper. Paddy could have laughed but he was watchful in the boat. There was always the chance his sister’s violence would have consequences more lasting than the sharp passing disturbance which was her speciality.
‘Will you sit down, Margie dear. Please. Sit down dear, there’s no problem. My, that must have been a big old fish who liked your hook, eh. Did you see it, Paddy? Did you see the bite on the line?’
Margie had sat down in the boat and buried her face in her knees. Now she half-turned to look at Paddy, to see what her younger brother would do. It was in her nature to desire carnage and upset within the family. She was especially incensed by their father’s temperament, his good humour and gentleness, none of which she’d inherited. Yet she hated to be found out; it was the point on which her desire for trouble was finally half-hearted.
Real nastiness on both sides might have required her brother to tell on her; to offer them all up into further noise and unhappiness. Their father hated unhappiness more than anything. Paddy wanted Margie punished. She deserved something. But how could it be done? He saw how it would go. She’d woken their father up and distressed him with her distress. Soon she could expect a hug, which she’d accept ungraciously. He ached with the temptation to bring it all down around them, to sink them properly.
‘Yes,’ said Paddy. ‘It was a big one. Margie’s rod almost broke, I think.’
‘How wonderful!’ said their father. ‘Good girl,’ he told his daughter. With care, and a slight stagger as the boat shifted, he stepped across to her and put his arm around her. She burrowed into him at first, and then began to wriggle as if he wasn’t quite doing it right, as if it was his comfort that needed to be accommodated and she was doing him a favour.
One time Margaret had come home for Christmas. She’d planned to stay for three weeks but changed her flight and left after two. Something was happening with the boys, she told Teresa, and she needed to get back. It was a miserable lie that her mother saw through at once and accepted with a nod. Paddy had driven her to the airport. While they waited for her flight he told her it was a shame she was going back into the cold of the other hemisphere. She looked at him closely and said, ‘I find it very cold here, Paddy. In that house, with her. There’s no warmth that I can get. It all goes in the usual direction.’ She meant Stephanie and her kids.
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