Somebody Loves Us All

by Damien Wilkins

  She wore a faded floral sundress under a black cardigan. Her shoes were brown and looked heavy. Her white hair was cut severely across her forehead, just a fraction shorter than it should have been, as if someone else with an idea about Pip had gained the upper hand and despite misgivings, Pip had consented. He thought there was something childlike about her—the haircut and clothes contributed—though this may have only been because he’d always put her together with his mother when they’d been girls. Pip had been fair once but now her skin was sunned to the point of wearing a coating—like one large freckle or a stain—and it seemed unlikely this would fade and return with the seasons.

  He couldn’t think what she’d looked like at his father’s funeral. There was only the strong and uneasy sense of Pip with his mother, two heads close together, a cousins’ conspiracy.

  Now there was also a briefcase, which she put down beside her.

  She’d wasted no time in starting her story. Having taken care of the strawberries, she’d moved to the sofa, refusing any refreshments. She’d shown no interest in the apartment itself. She’d shaken his hand, ducking easily away when he tried to kiss her. She was light on her feet and Paddy had the impression of swiftness, of a woman disappearing around corners, an elusive spirit, unused to being the focus of attention. She was close to her cousin, his mother, in all of this. And once she’d found out Teresa was resting next door, she wanted to begin. It seemed that if she failed to start telling him immediately what she’d come to say, it would all be over. Hesitation was the end. Nor was he allowed to interrupt. He’d tried at first, prompted by things she was saying, looking for clarification, but she’d held up her hand, smiling. Paddy was her audience no matter how much that may have pained her.

  He’d been right when he’d listened to her voice on the phone. Smiling for Pip meant little; it was simply the way she talked to people and it didn’t express anything except that she was speaking. Silent, her face lapsed into a dullness that was at first disconcerting. The talking smile, this rather fixed arrangement of her lips, seemed to hold everything at a certain distance of politeness. Paddy had no doubt she was a kind person too, yet he suspected her sympathy might easily grate. He recalled the odd thing his mother had said over the years about ‘Pip the Good’ and ‘poor old Pip’. She was a loved figure, important in ways beyond their understanding, and these veiled criticisms were similarly impossible to pursue. His mother protected her cousin and kept her to herself. Over the years they’d stayed in touch, but he had no real idea what they said to each other or even how they said it.

  Yet here Pip was, telling him something he’d never heard his mother speak about and which he’d never known had happened. It was hard to believe she’d appeared like this, ready to narrate. It was exciting, and partly because she herself seemed excited by such an unusual event. Paddy had no idea what she was going to say from one moment to the next. He also had the impression that when Pip had confirmed for herself that this was the case—that she was novel, that it was all new to her audience—she spoke less with the smile and with greater flexibility and emphasis, if still perhaps with the solitary person’s uncertainty as to whether she was wanted in this unfamiliar role.

  What had she never forgotten? The weather on the first day of their biking trip, she knew and could recall with absolute faithfulness, the weather. How they’d watched the clouds move out to sea as they biked along the coast, settling over Kapiti Island like a … white crown! Pip laughed shyly at her own image. ‘We thought they were making way for us,’ she said. Sunshine marked the route ahead. The road was still wet from the night’s rain, and as the day heated up it steamed up beneath their tyres. ‘We joked that we were causing the effect because of our extreme speed. Of course it had probably taken us a few hours to get even that far. We were so badly prepared really, with only the natural fitness of two averagely healthy teenage girls. We were members of the Miramar Tennis Club but that was about it. No one ran or jogged in those days. Oh, there must have been clubs of course, harriers. But normally you didn’t do such things. If someone ran in the street, they were up to no good.

  ‘Poorly organised no doubt about it but I do remember I had an utter faith in your mother with the bikes since she was good with machines of all sorts. She had a surprising skill there.

  ‘Anyway, that only went so far. Teresa quickly had blisters from pushing against the pedals in a new pair of tennis shoes she’d bought for the trip. I had very sore thigh muscles after the first hour, plus I’d fallen off when I was looking at something in the distance—a train, I think. Ran straight into a hole. That would be me not the train. I grazed my elbow quite badly. Amazingly, we did have some bandages. We collapsed at regular intervals by the side of the road, inspecting the damage we’d done to ourselves.’

  It seemed both incredible and perfectly normal to Paddy that Pip’s story should involve bikes. Here was the sort of coincidence that encouraged people to think the world was a quilted thing, each person carrying a patch, the bearer of an illustrated scene or design which made sense once it was joined to its neighbour, creating overall an effect that was pleasing, cohesive. Still he wondered what part Pip had brought him? He’d never even seen his mother on a bike.

  ‘Maybe this won’t surprise you, Paddy, but here’s the thing,’ she said. ‘Cars would stop, they’d always stop when they saw us by the side of the road. We must have looked pathetic. But it was a different time too. It was a kinder time, I think. I want to say “innocent” though that may be pushing it, especially given what later happened. Yet people thought nothing of stopping their cars to ask whether they could help. It was just a different idea about manners and community. That’s my opinion. Historically, I may be talking rubbish. But as someone looking back fifty plus years, I can say with all honesty, things happened to us that would never happen now and there must be a reason. We must have lost something, I think. I’m out of touch with New Zealand of course but that’s still my sense.

  ‘We had many acts of kindness come our way and we were always being offered lifts. Farmers in trucks would want to throw our bikes in the back and drive us wherever. And we didn’t have to be stopped anywhere to be asked. We’d be biking along perfectly well and someone would want to help us. They’d pull alongside and wind down the window. On the first day we’d decided it was a rule not to accept these offers. Apart from our minor aches and injuries, we were going along quite well and the weather, as I said, was beautiful. Not too hot, very little wind, the clouds parting for us. So we always said no thank you. I think they thought we were mad. We probably were mad. No one really cycled long distances back then, is my impression. I think we were an oddity. People stopped to find out what it was that we were doing exactly.

  ‘Anyway, day one ended in Levin, which made us proud, I remember. We’d reached Levin! That seemed a long way on the map—not that we carried a map. I think my father had told us the way to go and we were quite happy to have his extremely basic directions to guide us. It was straightforward, right up State Highway One until we hit Auckland. “Don’t go to Napier” was one thing he said. No idea why. Once we hit Auckland, he didn’t have a clue and we were on our own and good luck to us. That was all right, we’d just ask someone. We were going to stay for a few days with one of my mother’s relatives whom I’d never met.

  ‘You’ve got to understand, the arrangements, the planning was very loose. We weren’t silly girls by any stretch of the imagination but we liked to pursue a notion. Your mother was great fun and very determined, up for anything.’

  Paddy wasn’t sure if Pip had seen something pass across his face, a questioning look, some doubt, for her to say what came next.

  ‘It’s sometimes hard for children to accept any image of their parents which is not the one they’ve developed through that relationship. But this was well before that relationship, Paddy. You were not even thought of beyond the most abstract abstract. We were still children ourselves. We encouraged each other. We were a good
team. Always laughed a lot. We had no fear or trepidation about the biking, despite never having been on a bike for more than about forty minutes, never having been further north than New Plymouth in my case and somewhere similar in your mother’s, and only having a very faint idea about what Auckland actually was, how big, how easy to get around in, how it looked and felt. None of this made us pause for a moment.

  ‘I got a puncture just before we stopped for the night and your mother had the tyre off and repaired in minutes it seemed. I remember looking at her while she worked and just giggling. She put the plaster on the tube and I think I said, Thank you, nurse.

  ‘Day two was always going to be harder. You wake with all of day one’s previously hidden problems now exposed. Where did we sleep though in Levin? I don’t know. There were towns where we slept rough. Can’t really remember being inside the tent. We wheeled our bikes onto farmland, or down beside rivers, and slept under trees. That was perfectly acceptable too. If we were found, and once or twice a farmer’s wife or a worker spotted us, perhaps, we weren’t chased off or suspected of something. We were invited into houses and fed and, very gently, questioned. I remember telling our story to a family of wide-eyed listeners on a farm near Bulls. They listened as though we’d decided to circumnavigate the globe. Auckland? They inspected our bicycles as though they must have been fitted with rocket technology. Teresa could hardly keep a straight face.

  ‘Am I making this sound dubiously idealised? Was it a nation of generous, simple, good-hearted people on the lookout for those in need? I don’t have statistics to back me up but as two teenage girls biking the length of the North Island, we took this sort of treatment as a given. I don’t think we thought we were charmed. We biked on with simple confidence, communicating to those we came into contact with the same unselfconscious and unexamined faith they too possessed. If we were unusual, and we were, for taking on such a journey, then this only increased the kindness.

  ‘But that second day was hard. Our bodies weren’t ready for it. The sky, I remember, was bare. It was boiling hot. We’d decided we had to get to the coast, to cool off, but we took a wrong turn somewhere and biked for a long time in the afternoon sun down deserted roads that circled back on themselves.

  ‘“We should have stayed on Highway One like my father told us,” I said.

  ‘“Shut up,” said Teresa.

  ‘And she was right. Shut up.

  ‘At one stage we emerged onto a major road and set off in what turned out to be completely the wrong direction. We were heading back south! We weren’t speaking to each other by then, blaming each other. I wanted to stop and bike down a long gravel road which looked like it led to a farmhouse we could see on top of a distant hill. But Teresa had already passed the driveway, her head down, pedalling blindly. It was the only time I wanted to go home, well, one of the few times. I hated her back. I hated her pedalling. There was a pointless aggression in her pedalling, her legs were going round too fast. I could also see that her shirt was soaked in sweat, as mine was also, and I even hated her sweating like this. You understand how it can get, Paddy, do you?

  ‘I followed behind her, furious. She disappeared over a little rise and just as I was fantasising about a big hole swallowing her, I came to the top and we were looking at the sea! She’d stopped her bike and was gazing out. Then she turned to me. “Told you,” she said. It was completely the most stupid thing I’d ever heard in my life and we both burst out laughing. We were dehydrated too, I’m sure. Brain-fried. We had to get off our bikes and fall into the grass, still laughing. We let our bikes crash down. We didn’t care. We loathed the bikes right then and hoped they’d break and we wouldn’t be able to carry on our journey to Auckland. Who cared about Auckland anyway? It was so delicious to lie in the grass, delirious and exhausted.

  ‘Eventually we stood up, picked up our bikes and made our way down to the beach for a swim. And this was where we slept the second night, just up from the beach, on a springy stretch of sandy grass, with a few sheep moving around us. You could hear them munching in the night, a sound like someone tearing their hair out but we didn’t mind. What did we eat? Certainly we didn’t have dinner—we were going to get that further on at some town. What town? Well, we didn’t know names, we just took what came at us. We felt amazed people lived here.

  ‘Anyway, the third morning we got going very early and made great progress. We biked seriously, hardly talking the whole time. There was no bitterness or bad feeling at all. We knew we had to rely on each other. It was as if we’d used up all our emotions the previous day, and we pushed on automatically and very efficiently. And maybe for that reason, I have no memory of where we stayed the next night or what we did there. General tiredness might be the cover-all phrase, and a sense of satisfaction, we were really doing it!

  ‘One of the days, however, we didn’t go anywhere. Because I’d stupidly taken off my tennis shoes and put on sandals to ride in the heat. Guess what? I woke up with the tops of my feet badly sunburnt. I remember the tent then, lying in agony by myself. I think your mother had gone off in a huff. She came back later on and she rubbed cooling cream onto my feet, which was lovely.

  ‘I’m sorry, Paddy, if this is all going too slowly. It probably seems to you as if you’ve been asked to experience our epic journey in real time. I’ll try to speed it up. I’ve never told this story out loud though I’ve said it to myself many many times over the years and things can go faster in one’s head.

  ‘You’ve heard about Bulls. Let’s move on.

  ‘We arrived at Waiouru hopelessly under-dressed. I don’t think either of us knew what the Desert Road was. Perhaps we knew about the mountains but even there I’m not sure. In winter, snow sometimes shut the road, we knew that in an abstract way but we would never have asked ourselves why this road and not others? It was just something odd that people mentioned happening somewhere else. Could we have been so lacking in curiosity? I fear yes.

  ‘Actually I was terrified and trying not to show it. At the tearooms there was a strange feeling suddenly. There was a table of young soldiers who kept looking at us, and there were truck drivers. We had no idea what the army was doing here. The presence of the soldiers certainly didn’t help our nerves. They were eating raspberry buns that left cream all over their faces and they were drinking milkshakes. Not much older than boys, about our age, but dressed in uniforms. It was all strange. We sensed that we’d come to a kind of portal. That’s the only way I can describe it. A place where you go through. That was the talk. We overheard things at the other tables, talk of slips, and corners, accidents. I mean, it wasn’t intimidating talk, it was just how people thought of that stretch. Is it still the case? Not sure. But we knew we’d come to somewhere important. We felt very girlish in those tearooms, in the middle of a male world so different from our fathers’ world—my father was an accountant—and the mountains loomed, it’s the only word I can think of.

  ‘There was a chill in the air that took us by surprise. It went straight through our thin summer shirts. Even inside the tearooms we couldn’t escape it. It was as if we’d biked into another month altogether when of course all we’d done was ascend to the volcanic plateau. That phrase itself—“volcanic plateau”—would have been meaningless to us before this moment. We put on jerseys but they were lightweight summer ones. I remember Teresa slipping her jersey over her bare knees and hugging herself under the table. I told her she’d stretch her jersey and she said she didn’t care, better than freeze. But she stopped doing it and smiled at me. “Let’s go then,” she said, and she stood up and clapped her hands. I was so grateful to her, so impressed and buoyed up by that clap! It was all an act but it was a good act. People turned to look at us. The soldiers stared, a couple of them were grinning. One gave a clap just like Teresa’s but we pretended not to notice or care. We wheeled our bikes out of sight of the tearoom. Didn’t want them to see us getting on our bikes. We walked a bit down the road, wheeling them, then took off as if nothing matter
ed.

  ‘I was biking at first with my breath held, if that’s possible. Teresa was out in front and I had no idea how she was feeling but immediately I was getting very tired. I had so little energy, despite having just eaten at the tearooms. It was because I wasn’t getting enough oxygen and even though intellectually I knew this, I didn’t seem able to adjust. My heart was racing and my breaths were like hiccups.

  ‘I remember a terrific wind had come up and it was buffeting us from the side. I knew that if I tried to shout out to Teresa she wouldn’t be able to hear me. She was further ahead of me now, perhaps fifty yards or so. I saw a sign by the side of the road warning about army testing. We had to stick to the road, to leave it would be a “grave risk to civilian safety”. I thought of the soldiers back at the tearooms, eating their raspberry cream buns. We didn’t even know how long the Desert Road was and how long it would take us to get to the first town on the other side and now we wouldn’t be able to get off our bikes and rest because of the army testing.

  ‘As you know, it’s the landscape which gives the road its name. It’s not a desert as such but it chimes with something in our imaginations connected to the word. Inhospitable would be part of it. A duney place, isn’t it, but without any hint of the beach. Pumice, scorched rock, scrubby plants, and running alongside us, telegraph poles. I’ve travelled a bit and I’ve never found a counterpart for that geography, have you? If the rest of the country is all done and made, more or less finished, completed, beautiful in many instances, this is the place left over, exhausted from all that making, ground zero if you like. Or the geologists might just say, typically volcanic.’