Somebody Loves Us All

by Damien Wilkins

  She’d caught it from the radio? Maybe she was crazy and this was a sign, a symptom. She hadn’t been waiting for it exactly, yet she knew she was now only five years younger than her mother had been when that mind, without pity on its owner, crumbled, admitting the barefoot dietician with the silken beard and the stopwatch.

  In her eighties, her mother had grown to believe Teresa’s father was secretly in love with the young Samoan woman next door and these were his illegitimate children coming through the hedge. He gave them eggs from his hens.

  One afternoon, a few months before her mother died, Teresa had stood beside her as they watched from the window her father, a retired teacher, carefully handing the eggs to a young boy and girl. Her parents lived in a state house in Naenae. The wind flew against the high hedge at the rear of the property, turning it silver for a moment before switching it back. The leaves were glossy on one side and thick. They tempted you to touch them, and then they disappointed you somehow. Beyond the hedge, and through a little opening in the branches, there was barren public land that sloped down to a concrete waterway patrolled by stray cats. Teresa had always felt this place to be particularly desolate and despairing, though when they visited, her children often played there, if it could be called playing. You followed the waterway in one direction and came to a sports field which, in winter, smelled of rotting vegetation due to poor drainage. If you headed north instead, wading in the motionless shin-deep water, eventually you reached a culvert sealed off with a metal grill. She imagined in a flash her children swallowed into the darkness of the tunnel. Weeds and rubbish caught against the bars. She’d accompanied the kids once, Paddy walking in gumboots in the water, the girls on the grass. Lift your head and above the culvert you saw the hillside cemetery, the sun striking its tilted plane, where both her parents would one day be buried. Near the edge of the concrete waterway she’d almost stepped on the body of a dead rat. The hair on the body was brushed the wrong way. She’d scooped up Stephanie in her arms before she got a good look and jogged up to the line of hedges, calling to the other two who were bent over it. At such times she felt excessively widowed—widowed again and again, moment by moment, that it was ongoing and not a single event in the past.

  ‘I can’t believe he’s done this to me,’ her mother said at the window, ‘but at least he has the decency to treat them well.’ Then she took Teresa’s hand and held it tightly. The neighbour’s children were entering the chicken coop, bending their heads. ‘How dark they are and him so pale!’ The fantasy was cruel, hard on everyone, but it was also clearly interesting to her mother, a spectacle she hadn’t anticipated. She found life immensely surprising, until of course she didn’t. In her cupboards, which had once been full of home baking, chutneys, bottles of preserved fruit, there was only white bread, salt, pre-washed potatoes, mayonnaise mix in a packet. They discovered she was only eating things that were white in colour because of the dangers of what she called pigmentated food. Someone was telling her about this, a man she described as having a silken beard, bare feet and a stopwatch around his neck. Naturally no such figure existed in Naenae. She didn’t speak boastfully about this phantom, but shyly, with a strange girlish smile on her face.

  Was this what Teresa had coming? But then again, she didn’t have a voice in her head, she had a voice in her voice.

  She typed back to Pip, who was not online: Dear African Night Owl, all is fine. Teresa sent it before she realised she’d not replied to the line about Palmerston North. Her cousin would want something witty back, that was their style. She looked at the screen. No wit was in her, only a pressure at her temple, like a thumb. She went back into the bedroom and dressed quickly, as if something depended on it. Why wasn’t there time for a shower? She put on deodorant. She had an urgent sense that she needed to be ready.

  Although she had no appetite, she poured yoghurt onto cereal, chopping half a banana on top. For the time it took to eat this, through an old trick, she prevented herself from thinking. You imagined a white wall being painted, white on white. An odourless paint. The painting was important—the even sweep of the roller—otherwise you began to see writing, which led back to thoughts. She held it. In this blank space she hoped to return her mind to its normal routines, shaking off the foreignness that was only some ephemeral condition, the smudge that sleep had made of reality. Was she even properly awake? Then she couldn’t hold it any longer. And the banana tasted like a banana and the yoghurt she poured in was wet and cold. There was instantly something grassy on her palate.

  Once in Lower Hutt on High Street she’d been approached by a woman in her sixties wearing a tee-shirt that said across the chest: AIRBAG inflation on impact. Incredibly, the woman, it turned out, was from France. She was nice, very polite, cultured, with perfect wavy white hair. Her handbag carried exquisite scrollwork on its strap, the body of the bag kept elegantly plain. Could Teresa tell her where the art gallery was? They’d walked to the Dowse together, stopping to name the trees, admiring the fountain. Fontaine, she said. She loved the montagnes. Willow, said Teresa, pointing. Weeping Willow. The woman tried it and then they both laughed.

  She thought about languages. She had learned shorthand, if that counted as a language. The name alone gave it away, as though the writer’s tool had become a claw. Men spoke and as fast as it came out of their mouths, you stitched it to the page. Pip, she remembered, had wanted to be taught a few words; she was training to be a dental nurse and hoped to write rude things about the dentists who bullied her, who rubbed against her as they looked inside mouths. ‘See here,’ they said. She wanted to write such things in their presence, smiling and looking meek in the Pip way.

  Pip’s return to New Zealand had made Teresa think a lot about things she’d hardly considered for decades. Moving house too. Moving moved things, she thought.

  Of course some people thought shorthand was magic, like spells inscribed on ancient tombs, secret code, but not the other girls from the pool. Shorthand was blindingly tedious, though you could use it to communicate to each other about boyfriends, pass notes under their noses. Pip’s instinct was right. It was the language of disenchantment, of hopes up in smoke, which was a phrase that came back to her.

  Come, come, come. You’ll love it here. Oh yes? The mooching pupae, Teresa wrote back, things biting you in the night.

  And who, Pip replied, is biting you in the night?

  They were both virgins.

  Teresa brought her tea into the bedroom and sat on the edge of her bed to drink it. Somehow this was better than being in the kitchen. There was a sort of intimidation still in the newness of the surroundings, in the wonder of it. Me? I live here?

  In the alleyway between their building and the one beside it there were occasionally young men and sometimes a young woman, perhaps a prostitute, involved in some transaction though it wasn’t a furtive thing. If Teresa happened to walk past, they didn’t move off or attempt to conceal anything; they turned and stared at her, but not with hostility. They said, you? Are you also involved?

  She tried to concentrate on the weekend ahead. Stephanie would pick her up that evening and they’d drive over the terrible hill, the three girls in the back, strapped into their car seats. Three dolls in a row. They always had fun. At the top of the hill Teresa would take over the driving while Steph held out bags for the girls to be sick in, and even this had a kind of merriment to it. Isabelle would want to hold her own bag. I’ve done more in mine, Mummy. And coming down the other side, there were the plains, which always made her think of the first explorers, the sunny knobbed expanse beyond the dark tangle of foothills. You breathed out seeing that, and felt pioneering, while also grateful the hard work had been done, the vineyards and cafés in place.

  She packed a few things for the weekend. It was probably strange to be going away so soon after moving in—Paddy had wondered about the wisdom—but Teresa couldn’t disappoint Steph. Of course Paddy wondered about the wisdom of that too. Make sure you get some time for your
self, he told her. Yet she truly didn’t mind, did not experience it as anything but natural, the maintaining or supporting or doing something with the buoyancy of her youngest daughter, who was excitable and radiant, and who therefore required some solid backing. Teresa was solid. Not to herself of course but she was aware of an effect and part of that was reliability. Yes she would be there when she said she would, and surprisingly some people never managed even this simple thing. And she didn’t mind it at all, the running around, the ferrying, the caring, though not many believed her. But she was also her daughter’s audience and found that sustaining, interesting on a daily basis, as she did all her children’s lives, even Margie, who’d always struggled with her younger sister’s position, actually with any arrangement concerning the family. It was why she lived in Canada.

  Darling Pip, I’m thinking of coming, I am. You know I won’t and can’t and how could I but I’m thinking of it, thinking of you under the mosquito net, among the grasshoppers, among the pink giraffes. Pip had been served first in a shop, despite the queue in front of her. Blacks. The thing is, Pip wrote, you can’t not be served first. The blacks don’t like it if you try.

  Sometimes Stephanie entered the house calling out that she was there, expecting nothing less than immediate attention, and it was as if she’d come home from school for lunch and her daughters were kids she’d befriended on the way. Look who I found. She seemed very distant from them. Stephanie was a great mother and sometimes she desired, understandably, to be free of that, even to be not very good, helpless, lost. Teresa would discover her at the open door of the fridge. ‘I’m totally starving! We all are!’ Her voice itself not just the echo but the actual voice of the girl she’d been.

  That was the old house. Now you had to buzz people in. They stood in the street, looking up.

  After washing her breakfast things, Teresa had left the apartment building by the stairs; she was still not quite used to the lift. The alley was deserted. The shops weren’t open yet and she walked in a large pointless circle, around the waterfront and back to Courtenay Place, taking in almost nothing. There was a small man in a yellow woollen hat juggling tennis balls, grinning at her. Had he been left over from the night before? Yet he wasn’t drunk because he was keeping four balls, or even five, in the air. She didn’t want to pause and count. She turned away from him as she passed and became aware that he was following her. He was bouncing a ball in time with her steps. After a few paces he stopped. In her head ran the same few words. Vendredi. Novembre. Mercredi. The thermometer’s mercury again, the sounds of each word seeming silvery, globular, liquid, as they slid backwards into each other in a sort of song that was tiring, catchy, impossible to get rid of.

  Leaving Moore Wilson’s with the supplies, she felt her teeth become strange, heavy, partly locked, her tongue caught behind them, its tip pressed hard against the roof of her mouth. Her jaw was suddenly tight. She didn’t seem to be willing any of this. A kind of paralysis, she thought. Stroke. I’m having a stroke. Why hadn’t she thought of that before?

  That the idea failed to bring her to her knees gave her a strengthening boost of pride; even if she were dying, there was a decent streak of realism in her. My speech has been affected in the direction of the Romance languages. And still she was able to swing her arms, carry her shopping, walk along this Wellington street. She didn’t have the nice bag with its elegant scrollwork, the surprising teeshirt, the fixed wavy hair—there were no fontaines or montagnes—but she had still become this, a slightly French woman on her way home.

  She moved through the covered car park with her bags, a little fearful, but determined. A van had to stop for her though she was only aware of it after she’d crossed in front of it. That woke her up to the world. The dread of collapsing in public did it. She’d seen these women, lying on crowded footpaths, their sweaty heads propped up on someone’s balled-up jacket, semi-conscious, apologising; the deathless instinct to cover one’s knees. Let me go in my own place, she prayed. She was carrying the world’s most expensive sausages, chocolate bread.

  People passed her, going to work. Gusts of wind struck at her in contradictory ways, wrapping the plastic shopping bags against her legs, and then releasing her, giving her a shove. Off you go. Her step was steady and fierce. She realised she was going past Helena’s work and she kept her head down. She didn’t want to meet the kind Helena now. Helena was a busy lady too. Such a meeting might easily knock Teresa off her feet completely. The temptation would be to fall weeping and close-mouthed into those arms. Unfair unfair.

  She glanced up at the sign: Capital Language School. The irony stabbed at her, pin-like in the tops of her arms, a joke injection. Languages. A Japanese girl waited on the steps, cuddling her backpack to her chest, her smile fixed in terror and uncertainty. Perhaps it was her first day and she’d just stepped off the plane. The girl’s eyes widened as they met Teresa’s. Don’t ask me a question, Teresa thought, ducking off. Where is art gallery? Look at weeping willow. Reaping rillow.

  She walked on for a moment, thinking of the people she hoped not to run into.

  Then Teresa turned back to see whether the Japanese girl on the steps of the school needed her help but she was gone and under this blow Teresa bent lower in her limbs. How heavy these best sausages were. Pith and rind were swimming and sinking in the orange juice.

  It felt to her as though she was wearing a headband that had slipped down across her forehead; this was sweat she realised, putting the back of one hand there. I’m so hot! She was coming true, she thought, putting it to herself as strangely as that. The way she spoke to herself in her head was just a little out, a little off. Coming true to that thing she’d thought of earlier—did she mean that? She was herself as a young girl, so foolishly affronted by the thermometer stuck into her mouth, she bit down on it. The shock she’d engendered in her poor parents. They were older than her friends’ parents, almost the previous generation, which gave their relationship a tone of—what?—care rather than love? But that seemed unkind. They were attentive, peaceful, bemused mostly. Her father had chosen her mother when she had few prospects—she was thirty-four—and they’d eloped to avoid a wedding in which the couple would be congratulated by a lot of doubters and smirkers, as her mother had once told her. ‘They thought I’d have one sort of life,’ she said. ‘No one thanks you for proving them wrong.’ Teresa remembered holding her mouth open for her mother to pick the pieces of soft glass off her tongue. Bloodless. Then her father, quick to recover, was pulling back the blankets to chase the mercury around the bed. ‘It’s the devil to catch!’ he said, grinning at her. ‘Help me, won’t you?’

  Her mother had left the room. ‘I won’t help wilful children,’ she said.

  Wilful? This hurt. Because she was not wilful and that was why her mother had said it, she thought, to establish a line everyone considered was very far away. Somewhere in the remote distance such a person, strange creature, existed, but not here. Her father finally scooped the little pool of grey matter into his palm. ‘Got you!’ Its moving surface like a mirror but also like the backing of a mirror, flashing light and dulling it at once. No, she was not wilful. Yet could a single act, one event, cause everything to change?

  ‘Toxic,’ said her father sadly, leaving the room.

  She was toxic, she thought for a moment, poisoning their simple eloping lives. They’d nursed her through the rheumatic fever. She was better.

  At the solicitors’ office, she saved the fare for the ship, which took almost a year. And then she was saving some more, for living expenses and emergencies, though Pip said she could walk into a job in Salisbury no problem, be earning well soon after she strolled down the gangplank, if that was what it was called. Pip would come to Cape Town; she’d be waiting on the dock, and then they’d travel up together. Yet Teresa discovered she liked saving, the act itself. And as she became aware of her cousin Pip growing more expert in her new country, more casual about its astonishments, not as detailed in her letters�
�fewer giraffes—Teresa felt less inclined to go. She’d be starting from so far behind. Thinking about how much she’d have to learn was a great disincentive to begin on that process, she discovered. Pip would have to be her teacher, which hardly mattered, she knew, it was just that she felt she’d done enough learning. She was impatient for life to begin, not for everything to begin again. And then towards the end of the second year of successful saving, she met Brendan.

  Finally, at the apartment building, Teresa stood in front of the lift, her arms incredibly tired from carrying the bags of shopping even though the bags didn’t contain much, or any more than she was used to. She must be sick, she thought. Just then she became aware of two people standing beside her, a woman and a boy. They too were waiting for the lift. The woman caught her eye and smiled. The boy was looking at his feet. Suddenly Teresa turned away, pushing through the doors to the stairs with her shoulder. She had five flights. The stairs were a light well and sunshine fell on her blazing head. She began the climb. It was still vendredi.

  3

  In the early and dark hours of Saturday morning, unable to sleep, Paddy went downstairs to his office. A topic for ‘Speech Marks’ had come to him in bed and he had to check whether or not he’d already covered it: the glottal stop. Would that woo Gorzo back? What was he, his lucky charm? He found nothing on his computer and straight away made some notes. Then he turned off the machine.

  On a bookshelf by the door, he saw the little bottle of oil he’d been given when he bought the bike. Next he was spreading newspaper under the bike and squirting oil onto the chain, slowly turning the pedal—just as he’d been instructed to do. It was nicely therapeutic. The cleverly interlocking links of the chain absorbed the oil and what they couldn’t use fell in neat drops onto the newspaper. Then he carefully screwed up the paper and took it downstairs to the wheelie bin at the back of the building. Before stepping out, he paused, listening for any sounds. Recently there’d been a flyer distributed to all the residents of the building warning them to take care, especially at night, and to be security conscious. Don’t hold the door open for anyone you don’t know. Druggies used the alleyway. It was silent. From outside he could look up and see the lights of their apartment and also his mother’s apartment. Her kitchen light was on.