Somebody Loves Us All

by Damien Wilkins

  It wasn’t a race. It had never been a race. Lant’s stylish and persistent riding was hugely aggravating. He was provoking Paddy, who shook out his hand again on the cramping arm and pressed more heavily with his legs on the downward stroke of the pedals, trying to imagine the correct version of the man he’d seen on the bike shop computer, the perfect horizontal at the apex of each push, the elbows lined up, the shoulders relaxed, the weight going neatly forward. A bullet not a duck.

  His side hurt.

  He heard a car coming up the hill behind them. Their bikes were going not much faster than walking speed.

  Twenty yards ahead someone was trying to parallel park. A woman carrying a baby and a baby-seat waited on the footpath for the person in the car to complete the manoeuvre. But the car wasn’t in properly and it was coming out of its park, angling across the narrow road.

  It was hard to hear with the helmet on and the wind rushing past. Paddy thought perhaps Lant had called out to him. The car coming up the hill must have almost passed Lant but Paddy didn’t want to look back and lose power again. He had momentum once more. The top of the hill was a couple of bends away. What was so urgent that he had to call it out now? He was the sort of person who’d do anything to win, Lanting. He was a psychologist.

  The woman with the baby was looking in Paddy’s direction. He saw the baby lift its head. How old was it? Five, six weeks? Very small, with a ball-shaped uncovered head, startlingly round. It was turning, looking for something. The baby had no words but only a sense that this was the direction to turn in. Paddy came closer and saw its mouth open. Mouth, nipple. Communication didn’t get any clearer than that. We’d all started there. Even Lant. The mother was watching Paddy.

  The gap ahead in the road opened a little as the reversing car made another move into its park. Paddy swung his bike out over to the far right-hand side. He could sense the car behind him coming very close. But where was it going? Nowhere. It would have to wait for the other car. Paddy had the road. Paddy had the machine.

  The driver of the reversing car saw Paddy now—an older man, in his seventies, the baby’s grandfather perhaps—and he stopped, unsure what Paddy was doing or where the front of his car was in relation to the bike. He was letting Paddy past. Paddy tried to acknowledge this, smile, present some gesture of gratitude. He was only a couple of feet from the car window. The man had no idea about Lant in his racing red, urging on this whole show. Paddy’s look was supposed to express some of this. How important it was to pass him now without stopping. A friendly, firm nod to indicate he was doing the right thing. Stay there Grandad.

  Probably the driver saw only a grimace, a look of desperation, strain. Paddy was pleading, demented, dangerous. He was the biker he’d write to the paper about, the paper in which Paddy’s column appeared. Paddy was a figure of increasing concern. He was thoughtless. He would be involved in a serious accident. Paddy could hurt himself, which was fine, what mattered were the innocent people caught up in such moments of idiocy. ‘My granddaughter, six weeks old, was almost involved in this piece of thoroughly avoidable madness.’

  Paddy did feel a bit mad.

  Then a car appeared in front of them, coming down the road too fast. This had probably been Grandad’s point. Paddy was moving around the halted car. The downhill driver had to pull up with a sudden jolt. Paddy saw his body rock forward and slam back in his seat. Jerk was travelling too fast. The driver sounded his horn, threw his arms up inside the car: what the hell! His voice was muffled and far-off in his car. This time Paddy kept his head down. They had nothing to say. He biked on. He could see the top.

  At Seatoun, they sat on the beach watching the interisland ferry slide past in what appeared to be about six feet of water.

  Lant had beaten him by three minutes.

  Against the muted backdrop of grey cloud, dark speckled sea, brown grasses, metallic-dull sand, Paddy thought they must have appeared, in their bright biking clothes, garish and showy. Visible from the ferry. Beaconish. The ferry itself was luminous, hugely white and gleaming. They seemed joined to it somehow in their vivid declarations.

  ‘It’s not a race,’ Lant told him.

  ‘I know,’ said Paddy.

  Lant flexed his leg in front of them. He’d taken one shoe off to pick at something. Sand clung to his long toes. ‘The reason I went past you on the flat was because I wanted to stretch out a bit, see how the bike was handling,’ he said.

  ‘Right,’ said Paddy. His toes ached but he didn’t want to take off his shoes. He didn’t want there to be a comparison made between Lant’s toes and his own, even a silent one. Paddy knew his weren’t long like Lant’s but that wasn’t the whole point. He felt the need to remain as separate in his actions from Lant as he could. Paddy was refusing to unzip his jacket since Lant had done that. He’d taken off his gloves when he saw Lant hadn’t. Paddy said, ‘The reason I went past you on the hill …’

  ‘Yes?’ said Lant.

  ‘Was to bury your conceited and padded ass. Which I did.’

  ‘You almost got knocked off too.’

  ‘Did I? Was that how it looked from behind?’

  Lant laughed sourly. ‘There were children watching that.’

  ‘It was a baby. They can’t focus.’

  ‘Now you’re accurately assessing the age of that infant from where you were on your bike on the road?’ Lant lay back on the sand, shaking his head. Then he reached into a pocket somewhere—Paddy had noticed Lant’s outfit was subtly different from his own, superior in clever, unostentatious ways—and took out a pair of sunglasses that he put on to look at the overcast sky.

  ‘Where did they come from?’ said Paddy.

  The sunglasses curved neatly across his face. Wraparounds usually made the wearer seem cheap, mean. These were shaped elegantly, sportily. They made clean lines of Lant’s cheekbones.

  ‘Did your eyes start stinging in the wind when we went around by the sea?’ said Lant.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘That was salt carried by the wind.’

  ‘They really stung.’

  ‘These help.’

  ‘Why didn’t you tell me about getting glasses before?’

  He sat up again, took the glasses off, and offered them to Paddy. ‘You could wear them on the way home.’

  ‘I don’t want to wear them.’

  ‘Wear them, try them.’ He held the glasses closer to Paddy.

  ‘No, you keep them, they’ll be covered in salt now.’

  ‘They’re made of a compound that repels all that, maintaining a clear surface. Self-cleaning.’

  ‘You believed that? They’re self-cleaning? Nothing’s self-cleaning, not even self-cleaning ovens.’ They did seem extremely clean.

  Lant shrugged and lay back down again. ‘These aren’t the reason I beat you, you know. They aren’t magic glasses. I beat you because I’m more experienced and smarter than you, Card.’

  ‘I’m glad we sorted that out.’

  The ferry slipped around the corner, heading into the ferocious Strait. The northerly had changed to southerly a few days before. Paddy pulled on his gloves.

  ‘Do you remember Dave Marshall?’ said Lant. ‘Obstetrics? I used to ride with Dave. Trouble was the pattern of our commitment tended in opposing directions. He couldn’t make it a lot of the time, and then I couldn’t. We were always cancelling, trying to reschedule. It was really annoying. So I said to him, “Dave, what’s up this time?” And he tells me he’d got to see, let’s call her Alison, I’ve forgotten exactly. Got to see Alison. “So we’ll make it earlier, yes?” But no, he had to see Alison. So I figured it out. I wanted to bike more when I was in a relationship. He was less keen when he was seeing someone. To have a girlfriend was for him an act of devotion, he was consumed by that and everything else fell away. Whereas for me it was an act of celebration to bike. It was an extension of—well, let’s not muck around here, fucking. I was energised. But Dave only biked if he couldn’t fuck. In a way we were both humping our
bikes, weren’t we?’

  ‘They didn’t talk about this at the bike shop,’ said Paddy. ‘If they had, I might not be here now.’

  ‘Dave biked doggedly, a hunched man trying to get through the dark times. You know what his favourite ride was? Uphill. He liked to be in pain.’

  ‘So I’m Dave Marshall? I beat you on one hill climb and you want it that I’m sexually frustrated and masochistic? It’s a long bow, Dr Lanting.’

  ‘No conclusions drawn. But something in that ride just now reminded me of Dave. You both have heavy thighs. But no, wait, you’re different too. You have a girlish bottom.’

  Why on earth had he confessed that to his friend? Paddy picked up a handful of gravel and threw it at Lant, who ducked.

  ‘Hey, whatsa matter? You’re a happy man, you told me. Woman of your dreams, nice place to live.’

  ‘I am happy.’

  ‘Good.’

  ‘Listen,’ said Paddy, ‘the mistake people make is they think happy is one shade.’

  ‘Okay.’

  ‘But happy is a range, it’s a—scale.’

  ‘And right now, you’re at the other end—of happy.’ Lant sat up again, taking off his glasses and examining the lenses. ‘Okay, fine, all I care about really is having a stable riding partner, someone who says yes more than no. So far so good, Card. Fortunately for you too, I’m rarely alone at night.’

  Paddy drank from his water bottle. There was still the plasticky taste of a new bottle.

  ‘Lant, how good do you think I am?’

  ‘At biking?’

  ‘Not at biking, no.’

  ‘In what way then? Morally?’

  ‘Professionally. How good at my job am I? Do you think I’m one of the top speech therapists?’

  ‘In Wellington, you mean?’

  ‘Go as wide as you like.’

  ‘In the country? How many speech therapists are there in the country?’

  ‘Doesn’t matter. Put me somewhere. You know I’ve given papers in Australia. One time in the States.’

  ‘Australasia now? America? I think I need the numbers.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Establish the mean.’

  ‘Forget the numbers. Am I in the top bracket?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Lant. ‘Depending on the size of the bracket. Yes. Definitely.’

  ‘The size of the bracket? What size?’

  ‘I don’t know, you won’t give me the numbers.’

  ‘I’ve written a fucking newspaper column for years.’

  ‘Syndicate the column is my advice, Card. I’ve always said that.’

  ‘So I’m not in the top?’

  ‘There’s a smaller bracket, I guess, a tiny number, above your bracket. These would be therapists of great prominence. The theorists of it all perhaps, rather than your practitioners. These would be the thinkers.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘I don’t know their names. It’s not my field.’

  ‘Right, so why are you pretending to know all this stuff?’

  ‘These are general observations. I thought I’d been invited to make a few of those.’

  ‘You weren’t invited, Lant. I asked you a simple question. Merde.’

  ‘Murder?’

  ‘Merde! Scheisse! Shit! You know, shit.’

  ‘What’s up with you, Card? What’s happening?’

  ‘I don’t know. Nothing. I sure don’t want to fuck my bike though. This isn’t sublimation.’

  ‘Everything’s sublimation.’

  ‘Okay, Tony Gorzo didn’t call.’

  Lant looked at him. ‘Gorzo didn’t call about the column and it sends you spinning?’

  ‘He never misses.’

  ‘Maybe he’s sick.’

  ‘Gorzo doesn’t get sick.’

  ‘On holiday then.’

  ‘And he leaves without telling me? Once he called me from Fiji to apologise.’

  ‘Dead. He’s been killed. His wife did it or his son, stabbed him in his sleep.’

  ‘Gorzo can’t die. Impossible. Those things he smokes will make him live forever. Anyway, I’ve been looking in the paper.’

  ‘Looking in the paper? Why not just call him then, find out.’

  ‘That’s what Helena says.’

  ‘It would be normal advice. Call him.’

  ‘And show him my weakness? Anyway, I tried. Got his voicemail.’

  ‘Okay then, voilà, progress.’

  ‘Didn’t leave a message.’

  Paddy stood up and walked over to where their bikes were resting under a tree. He thought of them as resting, as if they were horses, tethered there. Good boy, he said to his. Lant called out to ask what he was doing. Paddy told him they had to go. Lant looked down at his bare foot. He didn’t have his shoe on yet, he said. Paddy had strapped on his helmet and was wheeling his bike across the pebbly part of the sand towards the road. Lant was standing now, struggling with his shoe, losing his balance, swearing. Paddy heard him shouting but it hardly carried. The wind had begun to move across his ears. Paddy was away. He watched his front wheel begin to spit up a tiny continuous fizz as if he were carving something into the road.

  At certain moments it was clear to Paddy why Helena didn’t much like Jeremy Lanting though she’d never said so. She was bothered, it seemed at first, by his profession. He could be superior, Paddy knew that. Smug. Conceited. Oh yes. He dealt with a lot of violent teenagers, accomplished criminals. ‘Because he listens to terrible things all day, kids with knives making their sisters become prostitutes, I wonder if he thinks he can’t be shocked,’ Helena said one day. ‘Probably he looks at someone like me and thinks I live complacently. True enough. But how long would Jeremy last on the street? He has a season ticket for the orchestra.’

  ‘He doesn’t think you’re complacent,’ said Paddy. ‘Your life is full of refugees and immigrants, people who’ve risked everything and given up their homes and travelled. And these are the people who you help. He admires you tremendously. As for the orchestra tickets, I’m grateful for that because we get to use them sometimes.’

  Helena thought for a moment. She might have been considering how effortlessly he’d lied on his friend’s behalf, and was deciding whether this was sweet or not. Or she might have believed him. Lant had never spoken about Helena’s working life to him. Why couldn’t he have the thoughts Paddy had given him though?

  She said suddenly, ‘Why do you think he chose seats up behind the orchestra rather than down in the main auditorium?’

  There was more inquiry than attack in the question, and the promise of a fresh direction. It was a quality in her conversation Paddy enjoyed, the ability to move around rapidly. She was never stuck. ‘It’s a great view,’ he said.

  ‘Where you lose the soloists. They play with their backs to you.’

  Soloing was their word for masturbating, which of course wasn’t what she meant here. The appellation could have disastrous results, as in the time they both had to leave an orchestra concert—thank you, Lant—when a visiting Russian pianist plainly adjusted his crotch prior to the opening bars and Helena whispered to Paddy that they were watching a great soloist. He put this from his mind now. He said, ‘But you see almost inside the orchestra. You stare into the great machine. You see how the parts are all working. The musicians, they can look totally unconnected, looking inside their instruments and fiddling around, pulling bits off, then preparing to blow for two bars or something. You see them getting ready. How they exchange little looks with each other. The timpanist swallowing a sneeze.’

  She appeared grateful to have left behind the direct subject of his friend. ‘I always miss those things. They seem a bit bored to me, the musicians. Or just prosaic. A woman plays an extraordinary piece on the trumpet and then she tips the spit out on the floor.’

  ‘I love it when she does that!’

  ‘Yes, maybe that’s the difference between us. I don’t need to see the spit. Oh, it’s all interesting but I prefer to close my eyes.’


  ‘And fall asleep.’

  ‘And concentrate on the music.’ She looked carefully at him. ‘And fall asleep.’ Helena laughed. Her face in repose was surprisingly serious, her chin pointed purposefully, the lips set more tightly than she meant perhaps, her brow showing concentration; yet there was the sense of parody too, as if she didn’t quite believe in such earnestness but had learned to do it. With her glasses on, she looked like a university professor, though better dressed. When she laughed the reward was terrific, a huge, lighted expression, a wide and white and perfectly corrected set of teeth, the eyes brilliantly brown.

  ‘You’ve fallen asleep to some of the greatest music in the canon,’ said Paddy.

  ‘I begin with good intentions. Anything with a flute in it, I drift off.’

  ‘And very loud drums. Was it Tchaikovsky?’

  ‘They soothe me, drums.’

  ‘Mmm, something from the womb perhaps.’

  ‘I was an emergency Caesarean, born with the cord badly tangled. It took them twenty seconds to get me breathing. It was touch-and-go.’

  ‘I was born in the afternoon, then I let my mother sleep.’ How simply they slipped into these riffs on all they’d done and seen.