Somebody Loves Us All

by Damien Wilkins

  ‘I had colic the first eight weeks.’

  ‘She always had to wake me up to feed me.’

  ‘What was wrong with you?’ said Helena.

  ‘I loved to sleep. I loved my blankets.’

  ‘You remember your blankets?’

  ‘I have a sense of them, yes,’ said Paddy. ‘The silky bit stitched on the top of the blanket which pressed against my cheek.’

  ‘How extraordinary.’

  ‘Oh, I think being a baby was sort of a highlight for me. Of my life.’

  ‘You were the perfect baby.’

  ‘I was,’ he said. ‘That was before my mother became Cleopatra.’

  His sense was that Helena didn’t much care for his friend because he pre-dated her so completely and because they tended to communicate in a manner she almost certainly found annoying. Lant. Paddy was Card. Patrick, Card-Trick, Card—somehow. She’d never worked in a hospital. It was like going back to high school: nicknames, sexual depravity, problems with the toilets. Her language school was very grown-up in comparison. It was a serious business, learning the language that would help you survive. Studious people with bottles of water in the side-pockets of their backpacks reading the notices on the noticeboard by pressing their fingers under each word.

  When Lant visited, she usually left them alone after a few minutes.

  *

  Back at the apartment Paddy met Geoff Harley in the lift. The doors opened and his neighbour stood there, carrying a box. He said he was on his way to the basement. He moved aside and Paddy wheeled his bike into the lift.

  Paddy was sweating and sore, still wearing his helmet. He’d come in a hundred metres ahead of Lant. However, in a move designed to rob the moment of any satisfaction, when he’d checked behind, Lant was coasting, not holding the handlebars at all but with his arms folded, looking about the streets as if he’d never been engaged with him. How long had he been like this? Did he do it when he knew he couldn’t catch him? Or had he eased up to give Paddy his victory? At Seatoun Beach Paddy had certainly provided sufficient reason to think his self-esteem needed a boost. Then why grandstand it with the arms folded? In fact Lant had a great professional scepticism around the whole issue of self-esteem. He thought its promotion created unreal expectations. Quite a lot of us, he’d told Paddy, had good reason to think not very highly of ourselves. More than once he’d offered that the Covenay kid, far from being deficient in confidence, probably harboured a champion cast-iron ego.

  When they parted outside Paddy’s building, Lant shook his hand in a suspiciously warm congratulatory manner. ‘Did you see the dolphins?’ he said.

  ‘Yes,’ Paddy lied.

  ‘Did you see them? Were they feeding or something?’

  ‘I think so.’

  ‘I’ve never seen them so close in before.’

  ‘Yeah,’ said Paddy. All he’d been doing was keeping his eyes on the road and on his wheel. They could have been biking through one long tunnel.

  Lant lifted his special glasses off. ‘So how do you feel now?’

  ‘I could throw up,’ said Paddy.

  ‘There’s a pocket for that.’

  ‘A self-cleaning one I hope.’

  Lant laughed and put his glasses back on. ‘Tell me, what are they saying, the dolphins, when they talk to each other? What do the noises mean? Is it talking as such? Is it stuff about the tides, the presence of a school of mackerel they fancy? “This is a nice bay we’re in, isn’t it?” “Weren’t we here last year?” They’re social creatures, right? It’s not a million miles from the chatter of chimps, I think. But what do we know, Card? What are they saying?’ He was obviously making his speech as long as possible to demonstrate control of his heart rate, his oxygen.

  ‘Who am I, Dr Dolittle?’

  ‘No, but come on.’

  ‘A lot of it is conjecture.’

  ‘Conject away.’

  ‘Lant, I have sweat running into my underpants.’

  ‘You’re wearing underpants?’

  ‘Oh please. The guy at the bike shop never said anything about that either.’

  ‘It’s a personal choice area.’

  ‘Dolphins test their environments with sonic squeaks.’

  ‘Right, how deep the water is, where the rocks are.’

  ‘As far as emotional affect, no one’s sure. There’s been work done on happiness—’

  ‘Happiness again!’

  ‘—the sound of happiness. Pitch, volume et cetera. Whether there’s even a melody, a tune for certain states. Most of the studies are done in captivity. There was some evidence that loneliness had a distinct sonic pattern.’

  ‘Sad dolphin.’

  ‘That in an aquarium, a dolphin which had lost its long-time performing partner was saying or singing a different tune, if you like. Of course a lot of this stuff is anecdotal. Trainers hearing new sounds, reporting changes. But then you map it through computer analysis and the graphs show no change. Look, I’m no expert.’

  ‘People want the dolphin to be grief-stricken so badly, they imagine they’re hearing the sad notes. Fascinating.’

  ‘Or the software for registering such things is just not subtle enough.’

  Lant nodded, slipped his feet into both pedals of his bike and held it steady. ‘You’re in the top bracket, Card,’ he said.

  ‘Oh, please not now. Don’t try to repair the damage.’

  ‘What damage is this though?’

  ‘It’s nothing,’ said Paddy. ‘It’s the periodic wave of profound self-doubt that washes over us every so often and gives us the sensation that all our beliefs and values exist untested and that we live in a state of extreme vulnerability.’

  ‘I’ve heard of it,’ said Lant. He reached out and squeezed Paddy’s shoulder. ‘Sad dolphin.’ Paddy became aware that Lant was using him to stay upright and he pulled away. For a moment Lant wobbled and almost fell. Then he straightened. ‘Nasty dolphin,’ he said. He biked in a circle around Paddy.

  ‘So next time we see you,’ said Paddy, ‘you’ll be on stage.’

  ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘Your great gig at the school.’ Stephanie had told him about it weeks before. Lant’s band was going to play as part of a fundraiser at the school her oldest girl attended. Lant’s daughter went there too.

  ‘You’re not coming, are you?’ Lant looked suddenly concerned.

  ‘Thought I might.’

  ‘Some little school thing, I don’t even know if we’re playing.’

  ‘Anyway, I’ll be there. I promised Steph.’

  At the lift Paddy had had no intention of putting his bike in the lock-up, not yet. He was going up. Geoff Harley somehow had persuaded him, or Paddy had simply followed a lead, taken an opportunity. A surprising amount of life was like this. A door opens and we step inside. It was something Lant would offer. On the ride home Paddy had been thinking of Sam Covenay again. His feeling was he’d trapped himself in the pose of The Boy Who Won’t Speak. Perhaps the solution was not to try to break that but to offer him a new role, a fresh pose, to replace the self-defeated performance not with a simple return to the happy twelve-year-old Sam—he wasn’t twelve, he wasn’t that person any more—but with something as interesting, as radical as his current title.

  To have had these thoughts—no matter how misguided they might turn out to be—to have created the mental space while biking, was suddenly extraordinary to Paddy. He’d failed to see the dolphins not because he was hopeless, or not only that, but because he was thinking, working almost. At some point on the homeward leg, the pain must have been managed. It was a tunnel but not an empty or uninteresting one, and if Paddy had set out hoping to eradicate all thought with pure action, he was returning strangely full of ideas. The nausea too was passing. His ear didn’t hurt though it was surprisingly cold. For the first time Paddy felt reconciled to the bike. Everything else he’d done—leaving the bike in the hallway, oiling the chain at night, encouraging Sam to think about it—h
ad been preparatory. Here was the thing. It was coming. He’d moved from wishful to actual, it seemed.

  ‘I didn’t know you were a biker,’ said Geoff.

  ‘It’s all new,’ said Paddy, regretting it at once.

  ‘It’s a good bike.’

  ‘Do you know something about them?’

  ‘Alas,’ he said.

  ‘Alas what?’

  ‘I can’t.’

  ‘Can’t what? Bike?’ Harley was a disagreeable conversationalist, clinically MEF, meaningless enigmatic flow. Paddy could feel his good mood weakening under the spell of the other man’s knowingness. Geoff believed he’d already been Paddy. He’d had a bike. He’d done all that. Paddy regretted especially not having taken off his helmet but it was too late now.

  ‘The word came down,’ he said.

  ‘From?’

  ‘Exactly.’

  Geoff flexed one of his legs, displaying perhaps some significant stiffness that Paddy should inquire after. Paddy ignored the leg. The basement seemed a long way off. They both looked at the bike in the tiny space of the lift. Suddenly it seemed stupid and ugly and desperate. The bike was totally inadequate to the task it had been given, which was to carry forth the hopes of men of their age. Was this Helena’s silent point too? Paddy’s biking shoes made a loud clacking noise on the metal floor of the lift as he straightened the bike with an odd sort of roughness. What did he hope to achieve by this—to suggest that he was past the tender stage, that the bike was really nothing much to him? He’d already told Geoff he was a newbie. Finally the doors opened and Paddy pushed quickly away from Geoff Harley.

  He called after Paddy. ‘I met your mother earlier, delightful.’

  Paddy waved his hand over his head without turning around. Delightful? Why use that word? She was nice, his mother, she was agreeable, but no one had ever said she was delightful. She had little desire to charm. Perhaps in the Harleys’ world it made sense to say such things. These were the people who went out at night to watch for the light from wristwatches and mobile phones. He felt the temptation sharply to ask about these Thursday nights, Harley’s absences, but kept walking.

  Paddy removed his shoes and took the stairs back up to their floor, thereby avoiding Geoff, who was still moving things around in his lock-up. He’d kept looking over to where Paddy was putting away the bike, hoping to get him on his way back to the lift. Paddy carried his shoes in his hand and opened the door to the stairs as soundlessly as he could. His socks left sweat marks on the polished wooden corridor. At his mother’s door he paused and listened. Nothing. He rang the buzzer but got no answer. If she were in, she’d be playing her game anyway. She’d be in her headphones, in Vienna or Geneva or Berlin or Paris.

  He found he was wrong. Teresa had pushed a note under their front door. She’d caught the bus to Palmerston North to see Pip and wouldn’t be back for a few days. Well, she was her own person. And the Pip visit had been something she’d spoken about before. Paddy couldn’t remember the precise details but there was a tragedy in Pip’s life. Her African husband had died. She’d stayed on. But now with Mugabe that was impossible. As girls, his mother and Pip had been close, and for a time they’d written to each other. The Skype contact had been recent.

  10

  Paddy woke up on Monday morning without Helena beside him. The phrase his heart sank occurred to him. He’d never been one to think, Good, the bed to myself. Usually they were in accord here, their feet hit the floor at the same moment.

  He found her working at the kitchen table, doing spreadsheets on her laptop. She’d been up since five. She’d worked every evening until late, and had gone back into the school on both Saturday and Sunday. The Ministry had put in a last-minute request for more information on the school’s business plan. Helena said they were also behind on several budget items. Then two of her staff had gone down with a stomach bug following a catered lunch designed to boost morale ahead of the review.

  He brought her coffee. He modulated his voice to the carer’s tone. Kissed the top of her head. She turned to him briefly and smiled. Her face was waxy in colour. There was a slight tremor in her eyelids. She’d been rubbing her eyes often. How had he managed to underestimate this so badly? He should have felt remorse for his comparative idleness, and he did, and he also felt irritated—at what? Sad but true the idea that Helena, poor Helena, with her thoroughly admirable dedication, was the cause of his trashy response. She was a fraction deranged in throwing herself this completely at working towards an end that didn’t seem in doubt, and ideally there might have been something surprising and winning at his verbal command, a spell to break the spell. Recall the tui! But the ground he stood on was shaky. He felt vulnerable. His own crisis was small c. Hers took in the livelihoods of others. His was vague, mid-lifey, not very interesting. His was existential-focused, hers was existence-focused. She won. He agreed she won. Hers also, however, had an endpoint. The review would take place. There’d be a result.

  In the midst of her travails, he’d been biking every day, also deranged. He’d gone out to Island Bay, concentrating on keeping an even pace and trying to maintain a calm disposition in the traffic. Adelaide Road, Lant had warned him accurately, was busy, fairly narrow, and a funnel for crap drivers to enter and leave the central city. Twice Paddy yelled at cars. ‘Don’t let them spoil your ride,’ Lant told him. Private cursing he believed was the worst. Look closely and you saw lots of them, the muttering cyclists, people with valid grievances, driven inside themselves, stuck on complaint. Better to vent, call it to the wind, let it be blown behind you in a burst of saliva or be sucked ahead, words that you could then bike past. But Lant also said that gestures and shouts were generally useless; motorists understood finally only one thing: damage to their vehicle. A bang on the roof with the fist, a kick in the side panel. Of course you had to choose carefully when to express yourself like this. Lant said he’d once been pursued by two big blokes in a Falcon, finally losing them in an alley off Hania Street in Mount Vic.

  At Island Bay Paddy sat on the stone wall looking out to sea. It was very Rita Angusy—the blue water oddly still, fixed in permanent agitation. A single fishing boat, painted in blazing red, rocked forcefully on its mooring between the little island and the shore. The beach was empty except for a woman far along from him who was throwing a stick into the water for her dog. It was a ruminative scene, he thought. Meaning it might have drawn from him a series of reflections. Here was the space, on the edge of land, in easy reach of elemental forces—sea and wind—where a person, alone, might consider things. Yet he found himself considering only the ride back along Adelaide Road. Already he was preparing himself for the battle. Biking seemed to refer to itself all the time. It was about biking. Perhaps this would change over time and there’d be an automatic set of motions, allowing the free flow of thoughts. He’d had a taste of it on the homeward leg of the Seatoun ride with Lant.

  Behind him on the road, a car was pulling a small trailer full of branches and garden rubbish most likely towards the tip. A few branches were hanging over the side of the trailer. Leaves flew up behind as he went around the bend into the next bay. Unsecured load, Paddy thought. Hazard, he thought. He saw himself riding behind that fuckwit.

  The phone had rung a few times over the weekend. It was Dora. Helena had taken these calls in the bedroom, closing the door behind her. It wasn’t usual though she said afterwards that she hadn’t wanted to disturb Paddy. Each time the phone went he thought of Tony Gorzo, who still hadn’t called. Now with the daughter on the phone, Gorzo couldn’t get through. He’d asked whether things were all right with Dora, and Helena had only said that by now he had a good sense of her daughter. Paddy didn’t know if this was true. He had a sense. He had his army of prejudice. More significantly, the non-explanation rankled. It was unlike Helena. There was something chain-of-command about it.

  His mother had texted to say she’d be back from Palmie on Monday.

  That morning he saw Trudy (language d
elay), Kevin (pragmatic language) and Caleb. He’d bumped Sam Covenay into the afternoon, claiming an emergency. Friday’s session had been more of the usual. Blank boy, thwarted man. Paddy felt he needed a few wins under his belt. A straightforward run of appointments would be good for everyone.

  It was Caleb’s last day so Paddy said, ‘Why’d you need me for.’ The boy looked very puzzled but smiled. Why wasn’t Paddy getting out the paper and pencils, the Lego, the little cars they sometimes played with? Caleb was six years old and he was better—he knew it. When he’d started sessions a few months before, he used a more or less private language with his mother Julie and then she would translate for everyone else. The first couple of sessions he wanted her there with him in case Paddy didn’t understand. He refused to have his hand held but he wanted her there. It was a mix of fricative problems and consonant clusters that Julie had instinctively understood. He said geen for green, which was easy. He said single for jingle. But there were other trickier things, and recognising that he was having trouble being understood, he’d developed articulation issues through classic over-emphasis. Kids like Caleb often started by shouting words in frustration, mangling them even more, and usually ended up mumbling, simply passing over the troubling sounds to make themselves understood with the minimum fuss. When he first came to clinic Caleb was somewhere in between. Success with his mother—her cleverness in deciphering the sounds—had meant his frustration levels were manageable. He was also smart enough to see he was going to have to broaden his language base beyond his clever mother if he were to go forward. Now with his consonants in order and improved articulation through exercises, he knew he wouldn’t have to rely on the translation process.

  When she arrived, Julie, a published poet, handed Paddy a sheet of paper. She was his poetry supplier, lending him slim vols. On her recommendation he’d ordered Elizabeth Bishop. He now had it beside his bed. His poetry reading had floundered somewhere in high school. He was still wired to read poetry, more or less, as fiction, or for sense, which he knew was fairly arrested. He had to admit he liked people in poetry, stories. Bishop’s characters and narratives were appealing. Aunt Consuelo at the dentist, the fisherman with his fish that had skin like ancient wallpaper, the oil-stained family who run the petrol station, or ‘Filling Station’ as the poem is titled, with their dirty dog lying on a greasy wicker sofa. The person in the poem has pulled in to get petrol and amid the oil and dirt, she sees, sort of horrified, there’s an embroidered doily on a table, Why oh why the doily, and a begonia, which she calls the extraneous plant. Then the visitor thinks, amazed, sort of humbled, someone embroidered the doily, someone waters the plant, or oils it, she quips. It was also very funny, Elizabeth Bishop’s poem. The poem’s last line he had by heart, could summon easily and did so from time to time in a jokey fashion: ‘Somebody loves us all.’ Meaning not God but simply a person close by. He approved. A somebody trying to make a difference, a mark. The somebody was also the poet herself, he saw, whose lines, at the very moment they appeared to judge and to discard, yet loved the things she described. A big hirsute begonia.