‘But I think secretly you like it,’ he heard his mother say. ‘You like how small it is. A real town town.’
Then Pip: ‘It’s true, I can’t be in a big city for long now. Lost the habit.’
‘You could move to Lower Hutt!’
‘Yes! I should have bought your house, then you could visit and sleep in your old room.’
They laughed at this, and his mother said: ‘But Lower Hutt isn’t small any more.’ Lower Utt.
Hear that, he thought, she was remaking the place. It sounded exotic and new, somewhere almost worth looking into.
There was a silence and then Pip said: ‘I met a Somalian man in the Palmerston North Public Library the other day. I’ve been surprised at the number of Africans here.’
His mother said in mock horror, ‘They’re everywhere!’
When he appeared, they both stood up and apologised for starting without him but they’d been starving and had begun to pick, just pick, though it looked more than that now, sorry. Pip pulled a chair out for him, giving him the briefest look as if to say, everything’s all right, play along. It’s fine.
He saw that the food he’d bought had been added to. The table was set for a jolly picnic: a bowl of green salad, two types of bread, a plate of ham, smoked fish, cheeses, a jug of water with ice and slices of lemon in it, the strawberries, cloth napkins he recognised as his mother’s, also her vinaigrette bottle. In the centre of the table, an untouched pear tart. Their own plates were half-finished. ‘Look at this,’ he said.
‘Your naughty mother went out and bought things,’ said Pip.
‘Yes, I have it down now,’ said Teresa. ‘I go, I point. I nod and smile. I hand them my bankcard.’
‘She says she’s not understood by the locals.’
‘I’m not!’ His mother looked at his clothes. ‘But Paddy where have you been?’
He was still dusty, despite his efforts. ‘Oh, mucking about,’ he said.
After he changed his clothes they sat together eating and talking. He was admitted into their company by Pip with a kind of pretend deference that was still lovely. ‘Here he is!’ she said. ‘The owner of the house. The great columnist!’ She helped load his plate with food. Then she was asking his opinion on the best small town in New Zealand, which had been their topic before he arrived and he was no doubt much better placed than either of them to give an informed view. He said he liked Central Otago, anywhere down there. He was a Central bore. He began to speak of driving through the region in late summer. His mother cut him off. Too extreme, she said. Hot and cold, no. ‘Pip,’ she said, ‘can never handle a real winter again, she’s too soft.’
‘I am! I am! I’m ruined,’ said Pip. ‘But forget about me.’ She asked Paddy what he liked about Central exactly.
When they retired he and Helena had a dream about a house on a hill, north-facing, solar panels, a river below them, orchards nearby, the sun moving in a great arc.
His mother said a word they didn’t catch. She repeated it rather sourly. ‘Melanoma, from the sun.’ Her mood seemed fully collapsible. Was she annoyed he was there?
Pip laughed and struck her cousin lightly on the arm. She said to Paddy, ‘Will you grow grapes?’
‘We’ll eat grapes. And we’ll drink the fruits of others’ labour.’
‘Exactly! Because there’s too much work in a vineyard and you’ll be there to—’
‘Bask in the summer heat,’ he said, ‘while covered in sunscreen.’
Pip then asked about Helena, whom she’d never met.
His mother said unhappily, ‘She works very hard, very hard. Harder than he does.’
‘That’s fair,’ he said. He explained about the language school, the review. How committed she was.
‘What a neat lady,’ said Pip.
‘There’s a daughter,’ said Teresa. It seemed an ominous pronouncement.
‘There is a daughter, yes,’ he said, smiling.
Then Pip was asking about his work. What sort of problems was he treating typically?
His mind went straight to Sam Covenay. What followed now in that case? There was a good chance the boy might simply return to his old ways. And Paddy could hardly give the Covenays details of the ‘cure’. Or Sam might go home and tell the whole truth, the chase, the hiding. Could be a problem there for Paddy, although first they’d have to believe the devil.
He found himself telling Pip about Caleb, his most recent ‘graduate’, he said, and he spoke of the boy’s mother, Julie, who’d read him the poem.
‘What a brilliant tribute. They put you in poems! Wonderful,’ said Pip.
‘It’s my one and only appearance.’ He told them about the baking too.
‘How astonishing,’ said Pip. ‘In our day of course,’ she said, turning to her cousin, who’d stopped eating, ‘we had nothing like it, did we?’
‘Ginger gems?’ said Teresa unhumorously.
‘Speech therapy.’
His mother now looked in danger of dropping out of the meal altogether. She’d been staring at her food in sullen contemplation. She put down her fork and rubbed at her eyes. ‘There seem to be more and more of these problems nowadays.’
‘But is that true, Paddy?’ said Pip. ‘Maybe back then if you had a problem you just suffered it.’
‘You just got on with it,’ said Teresa. She lifted her head sleepily.
‘Well,’ said Pip, resting her hand on her cousin’s arm. ‘Was it that simple?’
‘I don’t see why not. People were stronger.’
Pip laughed. ‘Okay.’
Paddy said, ‘Are you tired, Ma? You could go and lie down in the spare room.’
She ignored this or failed to take it in. ‘If you can invent a name for it, you can charge people money for it. Slapped cheek syndrome.’
‘What’s that, darling?’ said Pip.
‘It’s Slapcheek,’ said Paddy. ‘Quite a nasty virus. All Steph’s kids—’
‘Slapped cheek syndrome,’ Teresa interrupted. ‘All Steph’s kids get it. Off they go to the doctor, paying out the money.’
‘Doctor’s visits are free for under sevens,’ said Paddy, irritated, yet hoping to pass this off as pure information for Pip.
‘Drugs aren’t,’ said his mother sharply. She was reviving. ‘Now we never had slapped cheek syndrome. Slapped backside syndrome, yes.’ She stared at Paddy. ‘Another subject, that one.’
‘Indeed,’ said Pip.
Paddy reached for some more bread at the same time as Pip. ‘Please, after you,’ he said. They’d never been hit as kids. For Brendan, it would have been unthinkable.
‘The child is king,’ said his mother. The child ees keeng. ‘You get arrested for touching them.’
‘Actually no.’ He’d not intended to make a response. He laughed. ‘That is not the case.’ It was a mistake to pursue the topic any further. His mother was clearly failing and of course Pip understood this. Yet even when well, Teresa had always been perfectly capable of saying such things and usually he was drawn to answer. There was a goading spirit in her. Its presence now didn’t necessarily suggest that she was under strain, perhaps only that she was in the mood to reveal his sensitivities. Right then he discovered he disliked her thoroughly.
‘The child is boss,’ she said. The stupid accent gave these provoking statements an edge.
He spoke to Pip, still smiling. ‘Yes, of course it was fairly recently in history that the child was sent into the fields, down the mines, sold into slavery.’
‘Slavery!’ said his mother with joyful scorn.
Pip sat back suddenly and brought her hands together in an attitude almost of prayer, bowing her head as she spoke. She was hoping that the table would reconvene itself in peace. ‘We’ve come a long way, that’s for sure.’
‘I agree,’ he said. ‘But as you of course know, Pip, children still end up in the army in some parts of the world even now, parts that you’d be more familiar with than us, so notions of progress aren’t universal.’
Pip sent a look in which her annoyance at him flashed briefly. She had loyalties. ‘Paddy, you’re right. It’s a terrible thing.’ She picked up a pie slice and addressed the pear tart. ‘Now, can I cut some of this wonderful-looking creation for anyone? I mean, this is something you just can’t get in Palmie.’
‘And yet,’ said his mother, ‘they say the army is exactly what some of these young people need. The discipline.’ Dee-cee-pleen. ‘And they’ve had some good results with that.’
‘Patrick,’ said Pip, ‘I want to give you a big piece.’
‘Terrific,’ he said, holding out his plate. ‘Terrific.’
‘You know he bikes now?’ said Teresa, her voice slippery with amusement, veering towards a sort of spitefulness. ‘He bought a bike and he goes out on it, he goes everywhere. He dresses up.’
‘How wonderful,’ said Pip.
‘He wants eternal youth.’
‘Bit late for that now, I think,’ said Paddy. ‘Besides, I didn’t even like my youth. Happier now than I’ve ever been.’ Instantly he wished to retract the first part of that.
‘He’s desperate,’ said his mother.
‘For this pear tart, I am.’
‘It’s very good for the planet anyway, biking,’ said Pip.
‘Oh, the planet,’ sighed his mother. Pluneet. ‘Sick of that too.’
Pip reached for his mother’s plate. ‘Thérèse?’ She’d said the name in her best French accent.
‘Oh, don’t patronise me, please! I can’t stand that. Both of you, just give it a rest.’ His mother stood up from the table, shaking. Then she caught herself, correcting her tone at once. Who is this mad woman in my body? ‘Sorry, dears. So sorry. Not feeling myself is the problem here. I’m so tired. Would it be too rude to lie down? I think I have to. I could go home but this is all right, isn’t it.’ Pip and Paddy were standing now and they reached to take an arm but Teresa waved them off. ‘No, no, I can manage. Thank you.’ She was walking steadily away from them. ‘You know the French for “sorry” is “désolée”. Learnt that. Je suis désolée. Now watch the elephant in the room as she moves slowly but with purpose to a place of rest. Did you see many elephants in Africa, darling? You probably kept them as pets. Tell me later.’
While his mother rested on the bed in the spare room, he and Pip did the dishes. Shortly after that, Pip had to leave for a meeting with a lawyer, a New Zealander, who’d been recommended by friends. She was trying to sort out a few things regarding her property, which she’d lost in Zimbabwe. She told Paddy that there was no question of compensation but she was trying to arrange for some people she knew to have living rights there. She’d talked on the phone and the lawyer had told her it was going to be very difficult but he would do what he could. Pip’s briefcase contained documents that she hoped might help him. She held the briefcase up and tapped it. ‘So many forms! So boring!’
She’d told Paddy all of this with her polite smile back in place, as if he couldn’t possibly understand what it really meant and she couldn’t possibly explain it to him or was unwilling to try. He recognised again how close she’d come in her story about the bike ride to allowing him to see into a sort of entrance. Now with great tact she seemed to be closing that entrance. Well, could she be blamed? What had he done to meet her?
They arranged that she could stay the night either in his apartment or his mother’s, depending on Teresa’s feelings, and be present at the MRI the following day. Though again, and despite his assurances that she’d be a great help, Pip insisted that this would only happen if his mother wanted it. If not, she could easily drive back to Palmerston North that evening.
She was about to leave and he wanted to engage with her again. He said something about Mugabe. There’d been stories in the paper about police beatings. A photo that was hard to look at of Morgan Tsvangirai’s stitched skull.
‘I once saw Mugabe on a bicycle,’ she said. ‘To carry on our biking theme.’
‘Tell me more,’ he said.
‘A dangerous invitation with me, as you know. But yes, it’s hard to believe now. It was in 1982, the year after the election. A nearby high school had been completely rebuilt and they’d put in a new sports field. Mugabe was very big on education back then, having been a teacher himself and then he’d studied for all those degrees. You know he’s a very educated person, a BSc, several BAs, a law degree, others.’
‘He got them in prison, didn’t he.’
‘He did. Anyway, he was coming to this school for their opening and we went along.
‘We sat in the new stand at the sports ground and waited for ages. I remember thinking, okay Mugabe’s not coming. He’s a busy man with a big job in front of him. It was a small rural area, nothing much. Then finally a line of black cars comes through the school gates and turns into the sports field, parks in the middle of the grass, and out steps the man himself. Robert Mugabe, the great hero of our nation! I mean, he was a hero.
‘Of course everyone goes absolutely crazy, weeping and screaming, men and women. There are children sitting on the dirt behind ropes and they started banging the ground with their fists. And he stands beside the cars for a while, smiling at us. Just smiling. You felt really great to be there that day.
‘Then someone from the school comes forward and he speaks with the prime minister. There’s a little stage set up near the cars, with a microphone for the speeches. But Mugabe doesn’t walk there. He goes to the edge of the running track, and then he sees this bike that’s lying on the grass, maybe a teacher’s bike, I don’t know. Did someone leave it there especially? Did one of his aides bring it and place it there? No one knows whose bike it was. Afterwards, many claimed it of course. Anyway, he picks it up, looks at it for a moment, and then he gets on it. Robert Mugabe on a bicycle! When he was young he would have had a bike of course but that was some time ago, you know.’
‘I know the feeling,’ said Paddy.
‘He wobbles quite a bit too, getting going. He can’t do it at first and he has to put his foot down. Finally he’s riding. But then he does a circuit of the school track, dressed in a suit and tie. One of the most extraordinary things I’ve ever seen, Paddy.
‘Slowly he bikes around in front of us, still smiling. It’s a terrible smile, I think. All around the field there’s this great hush now, the applause and everything has just died away completely. No one can believe it, what are we seeing? He looked so strange.
‘We should have cheered and laughed, but people were afraid. Suddenly you knew everyone was terrified.
‘And you know what? Never once did his hands leave the handlebars. He didn’t wave, he didn’t lift a finger off the grip he had to acknowledge us. How could he? He was concentrating with all his might on not falling off. He went very slowly and at the end of his circuit, his aides surrounded him, and he biked sort of into them, again in slow motion, all of us frightened, and they caught him, he simply crashed into them and they held him, and we never got to see Mugabe get off the bike, thank goodness.’
‘What were you afraid of?’ said Paddy.
‘I don’t know. Perhaps only that we’d seen it.’
‘Seen something you shouldn’t have?’
‘Of course.’ She shifted her briefcase into the other hand. ‘For a second, you see, he had no power. We had the power. We had the power.’
After Pip left, he phoned Helena. ‘How’s my Janet Frame?’ he said. For a moment she didn’t get the reference. ‘Running from the room? Running into the trees?’ No, she said she was still there, hanging in. He asked about morning tea and Helena said that in some serendipitous way, having in her haste bought a gluten-free cake at Moore Wilson’s, Trish Gibbons turned out to be wait for it gluten intolerant. ‘We put the cake in front of her and she said sadly, “I don’t know if I can eat that.” Oh, I could have kissed her!’
A thing like that, he told her, could have an incalculable effect.
Trish was also, Helena said, from the South Island, from near Banno
ckburn, so they’d talked over lunch about their dream of retiring down there, building a place. Soon they were swapping ideas on heating, wood pellets versus log burner, waste water systems, whatever. ‘Incredible,’ he said, telling her about the lunch conversation he’d had with Pip, the same topic of their retirement coming up. He felt his optimism begin to return. The lunch had been misery. Teresa was a worry. He was unhappy with his own selfishness. But simply by talking to Helena, he felt better. It was a wonder. He had images of them reading in front of large double-glazed panorama-giving windows. The underfloor heating, heating stones. Snow on the ranges. No doubt he was attracted to it right then because of the promise of escape. It was ten or fifteen years away! Helena already knew quite a bit about septic tanks and even this aspect of their grand plan was thoroughly exciting, romantic. In the space of a year, from when the idea first came, the self-sufficiency angle had already moved in his mind from impossible to daunting to invigorating, and this was fully down to Helena’s range of skills. She’d do the landscaping. The garden could grow most of their food. She admitted she could use a rifle. She was some sort of über frontier woman. He could be a worker, a worker bee. And they’d be surprisingly sexual. Otherwise, he’d told her, he wasn’t interested. Ditto, she said. They wouldn’t have neighbours.
On the phone, when she asked about Teresa, he fudged it a little. He was sparing Helena the gory details because why bother her now, on her day of days. Also he was tired of his mother. Then Helena had to go. ‘But things are looking okay there?’ he said.
‘It’s a damn good school, Paddy,’ she said.
*
He was working in his office, finalising exit notes for a couple of his patients, when he heard a voice from upstairs. His mother had woken up and was testing how she sounded. He walked quietly to the bottom of the stairs and listened but she’d already stopped. He heard her go into the bathroom, the water running, and then he went back into his office.
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