Somebody Loves Us All

by Damien Wilkins

  ‘Didn’t think,’ he said.

  ‘I should have brought mine,’ said Pip.

  ‘No,’ said Stephanie. ‘You’ve done too much already.’ For a moment it sounded as though she was warning Pip off, or venting a portion of the dissatisfaction she’d felt back in the café. Here was the person who’d first tried to steal their mother away before she was even their mother, and then who’d tried to steal them all away. Quickly, as if to smother her animosity, she embraced their mother’s cousin.

  The days passed in an odd sort of normality. Pip stayed on with Teresa in her apartment and the two cousins went out for trips in Pip’s car, up the Kapiti Coast, then to Eastbourne, and to see good old Lower Hutt and visit the Dowse, recently redesigned. ‘Too many doors, entranceways,’ his mother said. ‘Otherwise good.’ They admitted driving past the old house, where they saw that the two small kowhai trees, which over the years had slightly encroached on the driveway, were gone. When the trees flowered, a soft yellow light was filtered into the nearest part of the living-room, where Brendan had had his reading chair, known as ‘the yellow chair’ though its covering was blue. Teresa met this blow unconvincingly. ‘Probably they have a wider car. It makes sense.’

  Paddy held his clinics as usual, working unimpeded and, he considered, to decent effect. He didn’t feel impatient while his kids were in the room. He gave them all his attention. And he had no problems with his right ear.

  Stephanie phoned him every morning and again at night. She spoke without tears, reasonably and in a new mood of resilience. Their mother’s example was powerful. One of the girls had a bad cold. Instead of bringing the germs round, she Skyped Teresa whenever she could. She told him she’d picked up part-time work that she could do from home. Before the children were born Stephanie had been a market researcher, on the statistical side of things. Her reputation as a scatterbrain concealed a fine intuitive feel for numbers and patterns. Her old boss had given her the contract and in the future she could increase her hours if she wanted to. That could pay for a nanny. Paul Shawn had also come round and she’d not even let him in the house. ‘Are you proud of me?’ she said.

  He was.

  Apparently Paul had acted very concerned about Teresa. ‘This is the man who, as you might remember, when Mummy was having her seventieth birthday party, chose to paint the bathroom ceiling instead of come with me to the dinner. He told me he was doing it for me, so I’d be out of the house and the fumes wouldn’t make me nauseous.’

  ‘He doesn’t need a can of paint to make me feel nauseous,’ said Paddy.

  She’d laughed at that.

  When Pip and Teresa came home from their outings, they didn’t knock on his door and they didn’t ring him. Perhaps they’d missed a call but this didn’t matter—he’d tell them. Later they would come across for a glass of wine and they’d talk about the world, financial ruin, Barack Obama, about Helena’s life before she met Paddy. Days in the Alps. The gardening job. They desired news that didn’t quite touch them. It was perfectly understood by everyone that the moment Murray Blanchford called, everything that they’d built up over these days would be swept away.

  Occasionally he caught a look on his mother’s face that gave away the strain. He thought how waiting for the scan results allowed them two kinds of time. There was the easy regular flow of hours, in his case divided into sixty-minute clinic sessions, which you noticed because you were inside it, the day carved around you, like a fingernail going through soap. Then some other kind altogether. A thicker substance, reflective, heavy, possibly harmful. It was as though you were waiting not only for the future—Blanchford’s call, the consequences of a single sentence—but for the past too. Events from long ago were catching up, coming closer. Was this what disease meant? All time pressed together into a space that couldn’t possibly contain it.

  After his father died, he didn’t sleepwalk again. Because he’d outgrown it. But how did he know he hadn’t carried on doing it? His mother might have chosen to keep this from him. In bed at night during this period he used to tell himself, You were the Messenger. You tried to warn him. Your father saw you were the Messenger and he froze. He developed a long tale about Messengers, probably drawn from his reading, maybe Alan Garner.

  He and Helena made love every night for six nights. Outside their courtship, a record probably. It was as though they were in training, he thought, the only difference being that this itself, the thing they were doing, was what they were training for. Which qualified it, in his mind, as the world’s greatest sport. Utterly self-reflexive.

  When he went to bed, he’d sit up with a book on his chest, while she always read under the covers, lying down.

  After The Six Nights, when she’d turned off her side-light, he kept reading. She looked at him and said, And on the seventh night he rested.

  They both laughed.

  She said, ‘You remind me of that bit in Der Zauberberg.’

  ‘In what?’ he said.

  ‘The Magic Mountain.’

  ‘Ah.’ He was immediately sensitised. Rapid tingling. He loved her Germanness, her Germanity he’d once called it.

  ‘Hans Castorp is reading these heavy tomes, I forget why. I do remember his cousin, what’s his name? Never mind. His cousin is puzzled that Hans should have bought all these books when he could have borrowed them, and Hans says, no, we read a book differently when we own it.’

  ‘True,’ said Paddy.

  ‘But that’s not what I was thinking about just now. Mann writes this beautiful description of Hans reading with a book on his stomach, that’s what looking at you made me think of. The book it’s so heavy he’s not breathing properly, and he reads to the bottom of the page, very slowly, until his chin is resting on his chest. His head following the lines down until the bottom. Donk. Then his eyes close. He’s asleep. Wonderful.’

  Paddy said, ‘A book can knock you out, that’s for sure.’ He was very tempted to go down to the office and find his copy of The Magic Mons, the English translation. He was still reading Emily Bishop’s poems, which he kept beside the bed. ‘Questions of Travel’ was presently under his thumb. Should we have stayed at home, line-break, wherever that may be. Occasionally he read something aloud to Helena. Gradually self-consciousness evaporated. True even of poetry. He read five poems per night. He’d noticed a mania for numbers. At the supermarket he bought packs of things in threes, or three of things they needed. Three toilet rolls! Chorizo sausages came in a three-pack. He saw it when he got home and unpacked. There wasn’t a magic number, simply a repeating one.

  He read on. Then suddenly Helena sat up. She’d remembered something. In The Magic Mountain, Hans had been reading medical books, anatomy, things like that. The origin of life. He wanted to know what life was, what it was made of. ‘So,’ she said, ‘he dropped all his other stuff, engineering, I think, and read, you know, biology.’

  When she’d studied the book at university, they’d discussed this passage in their tutorial. Stage Two.

  ‘We had a very proper tutor. He wasn’t much older than us. Quite prim and a blusher. Obviously very bright at languages but, you know, straight through his degree and then he’s sitting in front of a class. Emotionally a little boy, I think. He had blond hair with a centre parting. And in the class we had a girl, a woman, who was extremely I believe the word is advanced. One of those people who don’t belong in their own sexual cohort at all.’

  ‘Affairs with her professors,’ he said.

  ‘Probably. I don’t know. I always found her very nice. Anyway, good old Hans thinks about sperm. In the course of his research naturally, the origin of life. And the book he’s reading says something like, all sperm is the same. The sperm of one animal looks like that of every other.’

  ‘Really?’ said Paddy.

  Helena thought, then said, ‘Really did we have a class about this or really is the fact true?’

  ‘Sperm is the same across all animals.’

  ‘Did you think you were spe
cial? But listen, our resident—’

  ‘Sexpot.’

  ‘No, no. You misunderstand. I haven’t explained her right. She was an adult. She’d put away childish things. And so we’re discussing this passage, what is Hans looking for, symbolism et cetera, the quest for meaning, and she, what was her name, I’m hopeless, she says something like, At the end has he masturbated? And we all look at her and go, Huh? What did you just say? And the tutor is simply not looking at anyone. So very straightforwardly she explains. Hans falls asleep with the book on top of him, it’s hard to breathe, he closes his eyes and that was all the stuff I remembered, I liked. Then a female figure comes to him and it’s all very poetic. I think I’d skipped it, lost the sense. In German the novel is a monster. In our class, the girl says, I want to link this moment of Hans Castorp reading with the sperm references. And she reads out a bit, he smells her organic aroma or something, which she says, now that sounds like her vagina. Now you could have heard a pin drop. Vaginas weren’t part of the class’s argot shall we say. But more than that, we see what she means. Suddenly it’s all totally convincing, sort of obvious even. It’s a measured argument.

  ‘The room is dead quiet. We’re transfixed. And she concludes, I think he’s being fucked by the book, only that’s not physically possible, so he takes matters into, as it were, his own hand. Is this even close?

  ‘And we all turn to the tutor, who’s gone this really strange colour. And he’s looking down at his copy of Der Zauberberg. I remember it was covered in this dense little writing, every page was annotated. God he must have known that book better than Thomas Mann and rivalled him in word count. He stays with his head down for a few seconds. Then he turns a page, looks at it. He picks up the book to take a closer look. Puts it down again. Thinks. I suppose I thought he was about to run from the room in tears. He was so flushed. Or pass out. He didn’t seem to be breathing. I think he was religious too, or at least that was a big interest because we spent long hours on spiritual symbolism, Christ figures. But it was extremely tense, waiting. Finally he lifted his head and said to her, Sie haben alles verstanden.’

  ‘What does that mean?’ said Paddy. He was excited by it all.

  ‘You have understood everything.’

  ‘No!’

  ‘That’s what he said.’

  ‘My.’

  ‘It was highly memorable.’

  ‘Incredible,’ he said. ‘Incroyable.’

  Paddy put the poems down and turned off his light. They were lying in the dark with, he thought, their minds bright. The sensation was he could almost see by the force of their living thoughts, see in the dark. They were lying on their backs, awake, with this visible humming. Whenever he’d seen phosphorescence in a night sea, he always thought, the human brain!

  He said, ‘I’d love to read that book again. It’s been almost thirty years.’ He agreed, he thought, he agreed with Thomas Mann. You were ravished by a book. ‘Dirty old Mann,’ he said. But Helena, exercising her gift, was almost already asleep. Incroyable mais vrai. Thus ended their record stretch.

  He did look in his copy the following day. He’d not placed a stickie in that part but finally he found it. The girl in Helena’s class wasn’t wrong, except Hans isn’t fucked by the book but by life. It’s the image of life, ‘its voluptuous limbs, its flesh-borne beauty’, which comes to him, embraces him ‘hot and tender’ until ‘melting with lust and dismay’, he’s kissed by her.

  Earlier, the hero asks, ‘What was life, really?’ And answers, ‘It was warmth, the warmth produced by instability attempting to preserve form’, which Paddy had to make another stickie for. He also wrote this phrase in a notebook he kept for such things. On the first page, dated Jan ’97, eleven years ago, he saw he’d copied a sentence from Mavis Gallant’s story ‘The Moslem Wife’: ‘Being childless but still very loving, they had trouble deciding which of the two would be the child.’

  And this from Yuko Tsushima’s Child of Fortune: ‘Far from being able to give the child what she was seeking, she was seeking the same thing herself.’ He couldn’t remember much of the book at all.

  After the split from Bridget, he’d languished, luxuriated, lost himself, learned and learned, in literature. Absented himself too probably. He had been a kind of Hans Castorp. Not consumptive, but consumed. He didn’t stay in bed or anything sordid. He was very active. It was a labour as well as the rest of it. He got up quite early, sometimes at 5am or before, and after breakfast, he read until he had to go to work. He was employed by the Ministry of Education as an early intervention therapist in schools. He had a car and, of his own choosing, a light load. Often he drove somewhere and parked so he could read his book. He had his lunch in the car. He was amazed he could read so much. July the same year he wrote this out: ‘She wanted to get away from herself, and conversation was the only means of escape she knew.’ House of Mirth. Then a gap of months before he entered under the heading ‘Peer Review!’, ‘Whitman wrote 2 unsigned reviews of Leaves of Grass himself. Tell Lant re self-belief.’

  These traces of himself, his preoccupations, were accurate enough in their solipsism. The car at Oriental Bay, fogging up. The man bent into his book. The pie wrapper on the passenger seat. Lone eater. Lone reader. They also told an untruth. Yes he felt alienated. Yes he discovered adolescents didn’t have a monopoly on such feelings. But he was not cut off. Teresa and Stephanie were wonderful to him during this time. He saw more of them, valued them more than he’d ever done in the past. They really cared for him. Meals arrived. What did he have, cancer? They phoned. Dropped in. Oh he resisted, told them not to worry, but he was kept up to date, he was kept in the loop of unwritten life. Which was warmth. He pretended they were being foolish. They helped him remain functional. He was still working, still contributing. He had a microwave, didn’t he. His mother baked biscuits for him! She told him his ex-wife was a complete dolt and got done over for saying it but somehow they all pushed on. And he read. He read like a demonic grad student sublimating an enormous libido.

  On another night beside Helena he dreamed of cells, but there was confusion, since the dream was always switching between the cell as biological unit and as the room in a prison, that form of cell. When he thought about it in the morning, the connection felt trite. He wasn’t even the sick one. Yet in the middle of the dream, there was sweaty fear. He was sitting in a jail cell, then the walls turned liqueous and pressed in until he couldn’t move. His hair caught in the ceiling with the sensation of honey, which was also grey-coloured, and when he tried to free it, his fingers stuck too. He was sitting inside his own brain. Beside him, Helena woke with her normal nightly gasp, waking him. She reached for her water. His stomach and his shoulders were so damp he had to get up and change.

  Paddy called Lant to arrange a ride in the afternoon. The weather was warmer and there was no wind. It would be like biking somewhere normal, in a benign city. He ached physically to get on with it, stretch out, feel his heart, little bubbles of unlocking thought travelling from the pedal to the brain, all the greased cogs of body and mind working together. He only needed to look at his bike shoes to feel the potential.

  But Lant said he couldn’t go for a bike ride. Yes, it was his afternoon off and he’d taken the last available space with the best fiddle teacher in the land and it happened to be that day. Two hours’ worth, and then they were going to a workshop in Wainuiomata that his teacher was running and that Lant had been allowed to sit in on.

  ‘Fiddle is what you’re calling it now?’ said Paddy.

  ‘My mother always called me a fiddler. “Jeremy, stop fiddling!” And now it’s come true. On that subject, how is your mother?’

  Paddy explained about the MRI, the terrible waiting. He found himself giving an account of his cell dream. ‘I know you’re not much of a Freudian but what do you think it means?’

  ‘It means you should go for a bike ride immediately.’

  ‘That was my diagnosis too.’

  ‘There you go. You do
n’t need me for dream interpretation and you don’t need me for biking. You went all the way to Lower Hutt on your own.’

  ‘I’ve already apologised for that.’

  There was a moment of silence. And then Paddy said, ‘You make me buy this damn bike because you say I need to be in better condition to face the things I’m going to face, and ever since then I’ve had all these problems.’

  ‘Maybe you should get rid of the bike, Paddy. Maybe the bike is evil.’

  ‘You never said you’d leave me for a fiddle.’

  ‘I’m not leaving you. I’m taking music lessons.’

  ‘In Wainuiomata? You’ll never come back from Wainuiomata, Lant.’

  ‘Go for your ride. Hug your mother. Goodbye.’

  He put down the phone and it gave a ring to let him know there was a message waiting. It was Murray Blanchford. He’d tried his mother’s number and left a message there too. If they could call him today, they’d be able to discuss the results. Ideally, he’d like to speak to Teresa and one or two family members at the same time. Normally he preferred to do this in person but with the weekend coming up, well, a phone call would be fine. That was it. Impossible to tell from Blanchford’s tone what was in store for them.

  He rang Pip on her mobile. They were at the Botanical Gardens. Then he rang Stephanie. They would all meet at the apartment in an hour and a half, and then they’d call Blanchford.

  He biked up Cambridge Terrace, around the Basin, then through Mount Victoria before dropping down to Oriental Parade, where he bought an ice cream and ate it sitting on the sea wall, looking at the boats in the harbour. Then he finished the water in his drink bottle. Further along the beach people were sunbathing, swimming.

  As young men, one night he and Lant had swum out to the fountain, each carrying a bottle of wine, which they’d drunk there. They agreed that they should each sit directly over one of the main spouts of the fountain. They had no idea whether or not the fountain was timed to start that night. Perhaps they knew it was unlikely, yet as he recalled they’d seen it in operation on other nights. But nothing happened. They’d left the bottles on the fountain when they swam back. Better than polluting the harbour. It was hard to swim carrying a bottle.