Somebody Loves Us All

by Damien Wilkins

  ‘Can we go home now?’ said Teresa.

  Murray Blanchford looked up. ‘So I would like to talk about speech.’

  Of course she’d said ome for home.

  ‘Okay,’ said Paddy, ‘so this is not her voice.’

  ‘This is not my voice,’ said Teresa.

  Blanchford had stopped writing. ‘Okay.’

  ‘I don’t sound like this usually.’

  ‘There’s been a change,’ said Paddy.

  Blanchford sat back, considering. He looked at his pen. After a moment, he held it up. ‘Can you tell me what this is, Mrs Thompson?’ Blanchford held up his pen.

  ‘A pin.’

  ‘And this?’ He indicated his chair.

  ‘Cheer,’ she said. ‘Char, you know.’ She gave Paddy a panicked look. ‘Seat, okay. Where you seat. I know what it is! The main problem is I haven’t slept. So you’re seeing me at a low point, I’m afraid.’

  They took the lift to radiography and then, while Teresa was being prepared, Blanchford led Paddy along the corridor, looking into offices. They found an empty one with a computer and Blanchford sat down behind the desk, tapping quickly at the keyboard. ‘What are you doing?’ said Paddy.

  ‘It’s a powerful diagnostic tool.’

  Paddy walked around behind him. Blanchford was Googling accent acquisition.

  He pointed at the screen. ‘Here. Astrid L.’

  Together they read about the Norwegian woman, knocked unconscious in a bombing raid in 1941, who’d come around with a strong German accent. Her neighbours then drove Astrid L. out of her home town on suspicion she’d been a spy.

  ‘Where does your mother live?’ said Blanchford.

  ‘In town.’

  ‘Probably safe then. From the intolerant neighbours, I mean.’

  So they were by themselves, they could joke now? Paddy stayed grim.

  Foreign Accent Syndrome. FAS. An urban legend sort of condition that Paddy had paid no attention to. A team from Oxford University was working on it.

  Blanchford sat back in the chair. ‘Sorry, of course this is not a diagnosis at all. We’re surfing the Internet for God’s sake. We need the scan and so on. Probably not meaningful to give your mother this information at the moment, but up to you.’

  In most cases of FAS, the change was temporary. The accent disappeared after a few hours.

  ‘You’ve not seen it yourself then in your work?’ said Blanchford.

  ‘No.’

  ‘It’s certainly more refined than the usual word salad. Dysphasics are ten-a-penny but French? My wife speaks French. She considers it horribly lazy and arrogant of me, which it is, but personally I’m waiting for all the world to catch up with us and speak English. It’s happening, you know, even in France.’

  Paddy turned from the screen to look at him. ‘Sorry, I wasn’t listening.’

  Helena and Stephanie arrived together at the imaging room. They’d met each other in the hospital car park. Paddy was hugged fiercely. Stephanie held on to him. He marvelled again at his sister’s physical power. Post-motherhood, she was a sturdy, ample person. Her cheeks were always red and full. The young Steph, his little sister, he remembered as narrow, wan even. Having babies had not robbed her of a certain nervous tension but it had given her an entire sphere in which she was not tense at all. Her daughters, remarkably, were not fussed over. She’d dumped them, she said, with a neighbour. ‘What are they saying, Paddy, is it a stroke?’

  ‘They’re not saying anything, Steph.’

  ‘Dementia? Alzheimer’s? The kids are so young for this to happen.’ She meant her kids. ‘Who’s told Margie?’

  ‘All they’re doing is some tests. We should ring Margaret afterwards.’

  ‘She had the stomach bug and no one went round to see her!’

  ‘Could be totally unrelated, Steph.’

  ‘And then she skives off to Palmerston North! Alarm bells should have rung then. She was hiding, was she? Poor Mummy.’

  ‘Probably didn’t want to be a burden,’ said Helena.

  ‘But that’s what people are to each other, burdens,’ said Stephanie. ‘Look at me!’

  ‘We should call Pip too.’

  They were sitting in a row of chairs along the back wall of a room mostly taken up with the controls for the scanner, which could be seen through a viewing window. A technician entered and sat in front of his board of lighted switches, making adjustments. They began to speak in whispers as before a show or a play.

  ‘Where is Teresa now?’ said Helena.

  ‘Being sedated for the scan,’ said Paddy. ‘They’re getting her ready.’

  ‘Sedated?’ said Stephanie. ‘Is that normal?’

  ‘She wanted it,’ he said. ‘She’d developed this shake she couldn’t control.’

  Stephanie made a whimpering sound. ‘I want to see her before it happens,’ she said. ‘She’s my mother.’ Paddy remembered something Teresa had said to him once about his little sister, ‘Everything comes out. Stephanie says all the things we think. It makes her seem stupid. But we’re all stupid aren’t we.’

  Helena took her hand. He was grateful she was there.

  A voice came through a small speaker above the glass panel. The technician pressed a button and said something in response. Then their mother walked into view.

  Stephanie gasped. Paddy was aware too that Helena drew back. Teresa looked tiny within the frame of the window. A hologram almost, performing in a spray of fluorescence. Dressed in a hospital gown, she wandered towards the glass, looking directly at them it seemed, feeling with her hands for the way. She pressed a hand against the glass. The technician on their side was gesturing to her to move away and sit down. It was fantastically theatrical, grotesque. Where was everyone? How could she be alone in there? On reflex, Stephanie stood up and said their mother’s name and held out a hand before realising what she was doing. The technician glanced around at them. A nurse appeared beside Teresa and drew her back towards the scanner. Stephanie sat down again.

  Paddy had never lived easily with the next image, the human body tied down and inserted into the narrow perfectly machined space. MRIs were worse but even the CT doughnut was hard to take. He’d attended a few of them in his time at the hospital. In the bad old days of Bridget’s mystery illness he’d had to be here and Bridget’s own calm in the face of the procedure was no help. Her submission threw into sharp relief his near panic. He got through it now by studying his watch. The gesture observed by anyone would have suggested great calm, even boredom perhaps. But, he thought, we are all stupid.

  For the time their mother lay confined there, strapped in, her head fed into the gleaming cylinder then pulled out again to be reinserted, the process happening several times, he felt pressed upon by thin wet sheets of metal. His watch-strap was silver and it seemed to turn too in his eye.

  They couldn’t hear the scanner through the glass panel but he could easily imagine the noise, which was a whirring, and this entered his ear somehow, causing his familiar symptom. His cochlea could be examined with a CT scan, but it was something he hoped to avoid. He was a health professional and finally as squeamish as Tony Gorzo had been, shaking his finger, trying not to hear what could happen, what did happen, every day, to someone. Someone like this.

  Helena whispered beside him, ‘What are they looking for?’

  He had to wait several moments before he could answer. ‘They’re just looking,’ he said finally. The haematoma would be picked up easily. Lesions could be trickier. A tumour. CTs could miss those. They’d have to come back in a few days for the MRI anyway. The CT was precautionary more than anything else, to find out whether they needed to start emergency stroke medicine. Blanchford would be looking in Broca’s especially. If something was pressing there, the vocal cords might be affected, the length of syllables. Odd to think of such units now, that a syllable had put them all in this place. A flush heated his neck and travelled up.

  They were allowed to take Teresa to the hospital c
afé as long as they returned her for final clearance once the sedative had worn off. She was back in her clothes and she seemed like a different person, different again. Still not her.

  ‘What do you feel like eating, Ma?’ said Stephanie, who’d walked her arm-in-arm along the corridors.

  ‘Every-ting!’ said Teresa. She squeezed her daughter’s arm and giggled. She began loading muffins and sandwiches and cakes on her tray.

  The change in her demeanour was striking and almost totally a side-effect of the drug in her body. Paddy wasn’t sure she’d fully taken in what Murray Blanchford had just told them having looked at the scan images. No evidence of stroke, no evidence of tumour, and no evidence of haematoma.

  ‘That’s strange then, isn’t it,’ said Teresa.

  Stephanie had begun to cry quietly at this point.

  ‘But I’d still like to do an MRI for a better picture,’ said Blanchford.

  ‘Then you’ll find the collpreet.’

  Blanchford leaned forward, trying to hear the word.

  ‘Culprit,’ said Helena.

  At the table Paddy said, ‘What’s happening, Ma? How do you feel?’

  ‘Great. I feel fine.’ She clapped her hands. Everyone had to laugh at that.

  ‘You sound like a frog,’ said Stephanie.

  ‘Very bizarre, I know,’ said Teresa.

  ‘What will the kids say when they hear you?’

  ‘They’ll chase me around and say do dee do dee do!’

  ‘When did it happen, Teresa?’ said Helena.

  ‘Thérèse,’ she said, smiling, making her name fully French. ‘Trees are green. Thérèse, never. Vendredi. It was last vendredi.’

  ‘What are you, bilingual now?’ said Stephanie.

  ‘No. Just a couple of words. I bought a dictionary. She told me my English was very good!’ She laughed and put more food in her mouth. She was ravenous.

  ‘French pig!’ said Stephanie.

  Paddy exchanged looks with Helena. He hadn’t yet had a chance to say anything to her about Iyob, whose visit seemed ancient, belonging to another zone.

  ‘Mummy, are you kidding us?’ said Stephanie. ‘Are you having a joke?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You are?’

  ‘Yes, you are.’

  ‘Well that doesn’t make sense to say that. “Yes, you are.” Don’t go crazy as well, please.’

  ‘I wondered whether you’ve been playing online against someone from France?’ said Paddy.

  Their mother stopped eating to consider this question but then failed to answer.

  ‘Do you feel tired at all?’ said Helena. ‘Tiredness can make the brain do all sorts of things.’

  ‘You had that bug,’ said Stephanie.

  ‘Then the bus ride to Palmerston North,’ said Paddy.

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Palmerston North, to see Pip.’

  ‘Pup?’

  ‘Peep,’ he said.

  ‘Oh,’ she said vaguely. ‘Yes, now she told me to get it checked out. She’s full of—sense, Pip. But we laughed all the time too. You know I don’t know what I’m doing here. I feel completely normal, except for …’ She was searching for the way to complete the sentence but finally gave up.

  ‘You sound, when you speak English, utterly French, you know that?’ he said.

  ‘Patrick, I’m not mad! I can hear myself. I’m fully aware of this.’ Theese.

  ‘Have you taken any new medication?’

  ‘Oh my gosh! Yes, I took these new French pills, do you think that’s it?’

  ‘What French pills?’

  ‘Oh, please, I was joking!’

  ‘Joking just for that or the whole thing?’

  ‘For that, about the pills. I haven’t done anything, taken anything. I woke up last Friday and I thought, “It’s vendredi”, that’s all. So I looked it up and it meant Friday. And I knew how to say it, apparently. There’d been an item on the radio.’ Rar-dee-o.

  ‘What item?’ said Stephanie.

  She explained about the French truck drivers, the snail. ‘Voilà!’

  ‘Voilà?’ said Paddy. It was something Murray Blanchford should know.

  ‘Thinking about it, you know, maybe here’s an opportunity, I thought to myself.’

  ‘For what?’ said Stephanie.

  ‘For … enchantment.’ She regarded her plate of food happily. ‘Although I wonder how I’ll feel when it wears off. I must talk a lot until then! I must embrace it. I must!’

  They ate in silence for a while after that. Despite her excited announcement, his mother appeared to be running low. She rallied again however. ‘I don’t like the idea of having my brain scanned,’ she said, seemingly unaware it had already happened. ‘If I’ve had a stroke, then it’s a done deal. I’ve had a stroke. Now get on with it. If I’m sick another way, if there’s a tumour in there which is doing all this talking, I feel okay, let him or her have a brief say. We’ve never heard from a tumour before, or at least I haven’t. A French tumour!’

  ‘Let’s not talk about things like that,’ said Stephanie.

  ‘Okay, darling.’

  Helena’s phone rang and she moved away from the table to answer it. There were only a few other people in the café. Every so often a café worker appeared to look over the food and to take away empty plates.

  Now there seemed a strange sullenness to things. The druggy fun they’d all taken advantage of seemed cheap, unreal. Soon they’d have to drive home. The clean CT scan had delivered an odd sort of result: one that was both deeply promising and deeply puzzling.

  It was dark outside. They’d lost sense of time. A woman in a stained white tunic flicked off the lights above the warm food counter. An orderly appeared at the door with a mop, looked around the café, and then reversed out in the same direction moon-walk fashion, grinning. Paddy recognised at once the little provoking amusements of hospital life.

  Helena came back and apologised. When Paddy looked again at his mother she’d paused almost in mid-bite. She held a piece of cake, which after a few moments she returned to her plate. She sat glumly watching the cake. There was a sense of utter emptiness in her look, as if the sedation’s exuberant tide had suddenly sucked everything from her. She raised her head. They were all looking at her. She was afraid of them. What did she feel like right then—a foreigner? ‘Don’t lock me up, will you?’ she said.

  They had to listen carefully now since the accent was very thick.

  ‘What?’ said Stephanie. There were tears in her eyes. ‘What did she say?’

  ‘Darling,’ said Helena, taking his mother’s hand.

  He sat with Helena in his mother’s kitchen. The only light came from a lamp in the hallway. Teresa was asleep in the bedroom. Stephanie had stayed for an hour or so and then she’d had to pick up her girls and get them to bed. There was the barbecue fundraiser the next evening at Isabelle’s school, Stephanie reminded them. She was expected on one of the stands. ‘Your friend’s band is playing too,’ she told Paddy. ‘But we can’t go, can we. We can’t. What are the rules now? What do we do?’ They agreed to decide on all that in the morning.

  They’d found a note from Medbh pushed under the apartment door—everyone was pushing notes under their door!—saying she could come later in the week and she’d ring tomorrow to confirm. On their phone there was a message from Angela Covenay who was sending her best wishes. She hoped everything was all right. Stephanie would be phoning Margaret, which was most likely a mistake though Paddy was glad not to have the job.

  Helena and Paddy had been over the possible causes, the possible outcomes. They were both deliriously tired. For Helena of course it was a compounded tiredness. How had she kept going? On her laptop they’d read again as many Foreign Accent Syndrome stories as they could handle. There were references in German she’d struggled through, though these cases were from the early 1900s.

  More recently, these. An elderly Egyptian woman in Cairo wakes up speaking in a thick Scottish brogue. An Arg
entinean polo player falls off his horse and speaks what one observer identifies as Gaelic. A young professional Czech speedway rider, Matej Kus, crashes in a race in Glasgow and is heard to speak perfect English to the paramedics attending him. Kus has only ever been able to speak a few English phrases with a heavy Czech accent.

  ‘A boy at my high school,’ said Paddy, ‘his mother became a witch, which is not the same thing, but this reminds me of that. They got a special oven in their backyard.’

  ‘Coven?’

  ‘Oven. Do witches bake something?’

  Helena didn’t know.

  ‘Part of me thinks, just go with it,’ he said. ‘Take her lead. Take Teresa’s lead, or Thérèse. But which one? The enchanted mother or the one scared out of her wits?’

  ‘The key thing is that the whole business is temporary, that seems to be the pattern.’

  ‘Already she’s lasted longer than most.’

  ‘I have a good feeling about the morning,’ said Helena. ‘I believe in the basic goodness of sleep. If only I could get some.’ She closed the laptop. This gave him an unexpected and strong feeling of loss. Their options for finding out more and more seemed over now. It was the first time he’d ever felt this way about the Internet. Helena leaned across and kissed him kindly on the forehead. The kiss sent a little buzzing right down his left leg to the sole of his foot.

  Often the apparent oddness of Foreign Accent Syndrome could be explained through some distant connection. The Egyptian woman with the brogue had had a Scottish nanny, something like that. In none of these cases did the sudden rearrangement last longer than a day or two and frequently the victim returned to normal in a matter of minutes. The Czech motorcyclist, Kus, was particularly disappointed. Speaking through an interpreter, once he’d recovered—that is, lost—his facility, he said, ‘I was hoping I could go on speaking English like that. It’s very important to travel and compete on the international circuit to have English but now I’ll have to learn it like everyone else, which is a real pain. I think I’ll try to have another smash.’ He was a member of the Berwick Bandits and the team’s English promoter said, ‘I never really believed it was possible but this incredible thing was happening in front of us.’