Somebody Loves Us All

by Damien Wilkins

  Paddy finished the column in his office and emailed it to the paper. He was early with his copy. Clearly this was some way of getting to Tony Gorzo.

  In the Gorzo Christmas card they sent their love and they provided news of Jimmy, who went on to university and became an engineer and now lived in America. Paddy never replied—not for any special reason, just that he didn’t send cards and didn’t want to start. Each Christmas the Gorzo card came, along with a few others, and he was very glad to get them.

  When his column started up, Tony rang him, very excited. Paddy hadn’t heard his voice since the night in the hospital car park a few years before. Tony had read the column and he’d recognised Jimmy’s story, which Paddy had drawn on for a piece about the relationship of hearing to speech. Of course Paddy hadn’t named names. This seemed to disappoint Tony. He told Paddy that Jimmy was studying in Auckland, and that they were all proud to see themselves recognised in this way, no matter that it had to be anonymous. Hell, they knew.

  He asked after Paddy’s wife and Paddy told him they were divorced but that had made his life better. Gorzo sounded as though he didn’t believe this. He said if he ever lost Ellie he’d die. Paddy believed this and he said so. Gorzo wanted to know if Paddy was still at the hospital and Paddy told him about leaving shortly after Jimmy was discharged, about setting up in private practice. You’re the boss, Gorzo said. It’s the only way. Except GST, said Paddy. But Gorzo said he could tell him the name of a good accountant.

  ‘Why does the phrase “good accountant” always sound like “cheat”?’ said Paddy. Gorzo didn’t respond to this. Generally he didn’t like the frivolous.

  Paddy heard himself asking about Gorzo’s mother, the old woman on the hospital steps. She was ninety-two years old and refused to go into a home and refused to move in with them. What about his father? He’d died when Tony was fourteen. Paddy said this made them twins. ‘Really?’ he said. ‘You too? Actually we have a lot in common besides Jimmy.’ Paddy couldn’t think of much they shared but found he liked it being said. The assertion was somehow a hopeful one. This was the Gorzo style: say it and it was so.

  It was interesting to hear from him but Paddy thought that would be it. The impulse to make contact was satisfied and he’d slip out of Paddy’s life again.

  Two weeks later his second column appeared and Gorzo rang again. ‘How many of these things are you doing?’ he said.

  ‘Every fortnight they’ll publish one,’ said Paddy.

  ‘We read it and it’s not about Jimmy but still it was interesting.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘Now I got to read it every two weeks.’

  ‘Sorry about that.’

  ‘You think a lot about speech.’

  ‘Too much.’

  He didn’t like this and spoke earnestly. ‘Why’d you put yourself down? Someone else has that job already, I’m sure.’

  Paddy thought back to Gorzo’s squeamishness in the hospital. Certainly musings on language were more tolerable than the idea someone couldn’t swallow, but perhaps Gorzo had also matured. Still he didn’t quite know why he was calling.

  Then Gorzo told Paddy what Jimmy had been up to. Paddy asked him about his mother. He seemed surprised Paddy knew about her and Paddy reminded him they’d spoken about it last time. Still he wondered aloud why Paddy had remembered such a thing. No change there anyway on the mother front, he said. She was stubborn as a donkey, he said. Mule? said Paddy. He wondered if Greeks said ‘donkey’. Whatever, said Gorzo. ‘We talked about our Dads though,’ he said.

  ‘Yes we did.’

  There was a pause on the phone.

  ‘You never told me how your Dad died,’ he said.

  ‘He was swimming—’ said Paddy.

  ‘Shit, he drowned!’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Thank Christ for that.’

  ‘He’d had a swim, at the Riddiford Baths, and he came home—’

  ‘He was too tired from the swimming, he dropped dead at home.’

  ‘Hey, Tony, can I tell you?’

  ‘Sorry, I always want to know the end. Sorry, Pat.’

  ‘It was an aneurysm.’

  ‘Ouch.’

  ‘Ouch? Well, I guess. It’s over fast though.’

  ‘My Dad was fast too. A concrete post came through his windscreen.’

  ‘Ouch,’ said Paddy.

  ‘You bet.’

  There was a silence. They didn’t know where to go from there. They’d ground to a halt. Having given each other news of perhaps the most painful moments in their lives in such a wonderfully incompetent fashion, what next?

  Incompetent, yes. But also accurate. Paddy hadn’t talked about his father in a long time. Obviously he’d been waiting for Tony Gorzo to come into his life, to twin up. The night in the car park came to mind again when suddenly Paddy’s future took on a different shape. He missed his father terribly. Someone I loved and needed, gone forever, he thought. The piercing simplicity and starkness of that fact. Astonishing to proceed in the face of it. How?

  ‘So, like—no warning signs, nothing?’ said Gorzo.

  Before he died the worst thing his father had were varicose veins. Then kapow. Kapow? Paddy might have cried his eyes out then on the phone. Instead he began laughing. Not because of the varicose veins but because of the absurd way he and Tony Gorzo were finding their way through all this. His impression was that Tony Gorzo listened to his laughing with a completely straight face; perhaps he’d even be concerned. Some people didn’t laugh and he thought Tony was one of them. But he listened. Paddy believed the other man thought Paddy was terribly lonely and unhappy and he was the only real human contact he had. It wasn’t the truth but it gave their conversations a necessary freedom, a sort of wildness and spontaneity that soon came to be something like fondness. Anyway, he rang the next time.

  ‘When are you going to stop writing in the paper?’

  ‘Never,’ said Paddy. ‘You’re going to have to read me for years. Tell me about Jimmy.’

  ‘Why’d you ever give him the power of speech if all he ever does is ask for money?’

  They talked for a bit, and then Gorzo said, ‘What’s the next subject of the column?’ Paddy told him that was always a surprise. ‘Create suspense,’ he said.

  ‘That’s right,’ said Paddy.

  ‘But I hate suspense, will he, won’t he. Just give me it straight, I say.’

  The day he found the room full of pillows at the hospital, Paddy had been trying to avoid seeing one of his colleagues who had some kind of boring administrative task for him. He’d simply opened a door and walked in. The pillows weren’t bagged or covered in plastic slips; they formed a mound which took up more than two-thirds of the floor and which was higher than the windows. The pillows were clearly used, perhaps on their way out or being stored prior to reconditioning. There were always circulars about re-using things, avoiding waste. The pillows were grey, minus their pillowcases, and many of them carried stains. It was impossible not to see turning heads, suffering heads, the heads of all those people who can’t properly sleep, who sit up suddenly in the middle of the night to say things of great urgency to people who aren’t there.

  His sister Margie had once told him she couldn’t look at a bed without wanting to lie down and go to sleep in it. No matter if she was tired or not, she felt the urge. At dinner parties she had to avoid catching sight of beds.

  Certainly for Paddy right then it was not a question of lying down among the many pillows. He moved quickly on, down another corridor, looking to get away. The hospital was a great place to hide.

  At two forty in the morning, Helena sat bolt upright in bed and announced a word he didn’t understand. Was it a word? A demonstration of the glottal stop? Perhaps it was Arabic, connected with their talk earlier, her problems at the school. She hadn’t been able to tell him about giving her daughter the job. Hadn’t been able to say the name Dora to him. Some therapists believed nocturnal speech was revelatory in this ma
nner: asleep we spoke what we were unable to awake. It sounded a little like someone clearing her throat. Or the action we make after swallowing an insect. A raspy word of great importance to her since she declared it with complete conviction. She seemed content once it was out. Whatever it was, the moment had a different quality to her usual gastric outbursts, and she’d not held her chest. He asked whether she was all right and she looked at him without surprise, smiled dreamily, and lay down again to sleep. A few moments later he heard her sipping from her water glass.

  In the morning she had no memory of it. She said she hadn’t slept well and she didn’t feel like eating. He made her a cup of tea. Perhaps she was getting a cold, Paddy suggested. The stress of the school inspection. Brusquely, she rejected this. ‘I had a dream I was with my mother at some sort of market overseas.’ Helena’s mother had died before they’d met. ‘I was trying to buy a belt. My jeans were too big for me and I needed a belt. I was the age I am now, about. So my mother was handing me these belts and pulling them around my waist, tightening them, seeing if they fitted. Except she was choosing smaller and smaller belts. And she was yanking them tighter and tighter. Almost cutting me in half.’

  ‘I see,’ he said. He didn’t know what to say.

  She sipped her tea, looked at her watch. Her work bag was already on the kitchen table. She opened it, took out her mobile phone, regarded it unhappily and put it back again. She looked annoyed it hadn’t rung. ‘The old parent tries to strangle the child routine, huh?’

  ‘But the belt was around your waist. Can you strangle someone by doing up their belt?’

  She shrugged and walked out, leaving her mug on the table, something she never did. She always rinsed it and put it in the dishwasher. She’d not put a coaster under it either. He heard her in the bathroom, brushing her teeth with the electric toothbrush. Paddy had stopped using his because it gave him the low-volume sound for an hour or more afterwards in his right ear. This was one of the stimuli he’d identified. Helena had told him to get the ear checked but he hadn’t. There was no hearing impairment, no pain. Self-diagnosing, he queried mild otitis media.

  When Helena walked back in, ready to leave, he said, ‘What did Max do?’

  ‘Who’s Max?’

  ‘Your husband, Max. What was his job when you were married?’

  ‘Diving coach,’ she said. She continued to appear irritated by something. ‘Why?’

  ‘I’d forgotten what he did. Diving, right.’

  ‘That was a lifetime ago. What are you thinking of him for? Sometimes it seems like it never happened that whole episode.’

  ‘You have a daughter by him.’

  ‘And she’s a constant surprise.’

  ‘You gave her a job.’

  ‘Temporary, very temporary.’

  ‘Also you told me the other day about getting Max layered up in grease for his naked slide down the mountain.’

  ‘Near naked, he was wearing pants.’

  ‘Anyway, you’d placed him in my mental field.’

  ‘That was connected to the diving, I think.’ She left to do something else and came back again. ‘But Paddy, what about Teresa? She’s over this bug, right?’ It was said in the manner of, don’t bother correcting me, please, I require simplicity and obedience, and not because you are my inferior but because I’m stressed and you can help me.

  ‘I think so. I’ll check on her this morning.’ He helped her by again not saying more.

  They were moving towards the door now. ‘How did that boy go yesterday?’ she said.

  He saw again that she was trying to be normal. He was touched for one second. Then this pained him somehow. He didn’t want them to be trying to be things.

  ‘Sam?’ He thought of that odd moment at the door when he’d brushed past Paddy—he couldn’t say ‘reached out’. He couldn’t start telling Helena now about that. It needed some different space, that story. He’d rush it. She wouldn’t be able to take it in. Perhaps it was momentous. ‘Oh, you should have heard us. We talked and talked,’ said Paddy.

  ‘Really? No. Okay. Well. Maybe try the belt trick.’

  ‘I’ll strangle him into speech.’

  She smiled at this. He was pleased. Her straight even teeth showed. Yes, she’d had braces too, he remembered, and they’d worked. Then her bag began to ring and she pulled out her phone. In doing so, she knocked her knee lightly against his bike. ‘Fuck,’ she said. The bike began to slide down the wall and Paddy caught it as she skipped out of its way. She bent to inspect her trousers, brushing at the spot. She pushed a button on the phone and they kissed hurriedly across the bike. He watched her walk the length of the corridor, talking to someone, still flicking at her knee.

  A slight far-off booming had also entered his right ear. As a trial, and perhaps even in response to Margie in the boat when they were kids, he stamped his foot on the floor to see if it helped. Nope.

  From the apartment he rang his mother but it went to message. He texted her. Did she want to go out for coffee that morning?

  He rubbed at his ear and shook his head but the slight fuzzing remained, a watery sibilance accompanying his every step. Perhaps he’d been too close to Helena’s electric toothbrush both the previous night and that morning. She usually had the bathroom door closed. Was it enough now to be within hearing range for the effect to take hold? He’d once had what he thought was a repetitive strain injury along his wrist until he traced it to a new razor he’d bought which used a battery to vibrate the blades. Small things, small things. The Harleys came to mind, with their micro-interactions.

  Over the next hour, Paddy listened to his own ear. He read things. A box from Amazon had arrived. He’d totally forgotten ordering the book, which turned out to be a biography of Churchill. Why? Part of his wandering research into speech patterns of the famous? He had a folder on his computer. Lawmakers were an interesting subset. Thomas Jefferson’s lisp. Robert Kennedy’s spasmodic dysphonia. Moses. Moses, who hates public speaking, is speaking to God. How is anyone going to listen to me, who am of uncircumcised lips? Because he’d burnt his mouth as a child, causing him to lisp, was a theory. He’d heard a paper on it once. Norman Shelley was the name of the actor said to have impersonated Churchill for the BBC. He’d taken out his own false teeth to mimic Churchill’s impediment. Paddy understood he was delaying.

  In the phonebook he looked up the number for Tony Gorzo’s bowling lanes in the Hutt. Perhaps Paddy had offended him in some way? Yet when he replayed their last conversation, which had been about nasal resonance, he was sure there was nothing in it that had gone wrong. They’d finished the call on the same friendly terms. Gorzo had repeated the same thing he always used, ‘Don’t tell me the subject of the next column, will you, Pat. Let me stew here for a fortnight.’

  ‘I’ll let you sweat it,’ said Paddy.

  ‘I’m a nervous wreck,’ he said and hung up.

  Paddy rang the number. His call went straight to voicemail. He hung up. If Gorzo didn’t want the contact any more, fine. He knew where Paddy was. Sometimes you have a lot to do with a person and then, for no reason, the connection is lost. He had people in his life like that, everyone did. Tony Gorzo had appeared from nowhere and he’d gone back into that place.

  9

  That afternoon he met Lant outside the apartment building for their ride together. Paddy, wheeling his bike, walked towards his friend on his cleated shoes, toes pointing upwards, in his shorts and shirt and jacket. He wore his fingerless gloves like someone from Charles Dickens, a pickpocket. His helmet. Paddy felt sleek, vaguely Italian. An Italian pickpocket. The bike went forward alongside him on no more than the lightest pressure from a single guiding hand. He was aware of the hairs on his legs. It wasn’t a warm day. He’d been told not to wait for nice weather to bike in. They lived in Wellington. You just got out in it. What if it rained? he’d asked Lant. You put a tiny umbrella in your pouch, he said. Really? said Paddy. No, said Lant.

  ‘Look,’ said Lant, ‘the duc
k who can ride a bicycle.’

  ‘Shut up,’ said Paddy. ‘I’m in no mood for the sort of self-deprecatory humour I’ve formerly indulged in with you.’

  Lant looked at him closely and got on his bike. His outfit was red, predominantly, whereas Paddy’s was blue. Did red mean something, something better? Had Lant tricked him into buying bunny blue? ‘Okay,’ he said, ‘so you ready to put some k’s on that baby?’

  ‘Is that the way we talk now?’

  Lant rode forward slowly, adjusting something on his bike, looking at his legs. Did he shave his legs? ‘Let’s ride!’

  Paddy stepped into his pedals, clicking the shoes into place. By the time he looked up Lant was far off down the road. ‘Bastard,’ he said, starting after him. ‘Bastard!’

  Some days you had the legs for it and some days you didn’t. Lant had also told him this. It was the mystery of biking. ‘Fuck, it’s the mystery of life,’ he said. Lant saying this, and Paddy remembering it, wasn’t the reason Paddy felt as he now did. Something bitter was passing through him, like a mild flu. A vague impatience. A generalised wish for progress. Let’s go.

  Today Paddy had the legs for it. They were going around the bays, all the way to Seatoun and back. But there’d be hill work thrown in. Up to Hataitai, then down again. He overtook Lant going past the New World supermarket. Lant laughed. ‘Two more hours to go, shitbrain!’ he called out.

  They met a headwind. It watered the eyes. Beside Paddy, the sea sucked against the rocks. There was the smell of seaweed. Cars passed in moments of sudden noise and disturbed air. A small truck rocked the bike, causing it to snake, then settle. Paddy almost hit the curb.

  By the time they turned up towards Hataitai, Lant was back on his tail. Then Paddy missed the right gear, nearly lost his chain, and Lant went ahead. Paddy caught him about halfway up, at the steepest point. Paddy was out of his seat, pushing the bike from side to side. Lant’s technique was probably smarter. Of course it was, Jesus. He stayed in the saddle. His bike scarcely deviated. His feet made nice arcs. Paddy’s thigh muscles ached and he could feel the phlegm drying around his mouth. Was he grunting? Probably. Still he went away from Lant, pushing two corners ahead. His toes were jamming hard against the ends of the shoes, which he knew shouldn’t be happening, and he was gripping the handlebars so tightly a cramp shot along one arm forcing him to release for a second. He lost power. Whatever rhythm he’d had now disappeared. He made the mistake of checking over his shoulder. Lant had popped up behind him, still a corner back but gaining. Lant had his head down. His bike was steady. Air entered Paddy’s open mouth, stinging his throat. He tried closing his mouth but that felt too constricting. He needed everything open, everything pulling.