Somebody Loves Us All

by Damien Wilkins

  The day after she moved in, she’d knocked on their door and said, ‘So what are the rules?’ What rules, they said. ‘It’s embarrassing,’ she said, ‘so I’ll make a start. Rule one, I will not treat you as my new best friends. There’ll be no open door policy with me, for me. We should behave as though nothing has changed. I won’t be popping in all the time just because I can. I love you both dearly and hope to see a lot of you, but let’s not make regular appointments either. Rule two, I won’t come to you every Sunday with a pudding in my arms.’

  ‘Why not?’ said Paddy. ‘I love your puddings.’

  ‘I’m over puddings,’ said Teresa. ‘If you two don’t cook, then why should I?’

  It was true; Paddy and Helena didn’t. She’d cooked for her husband and her daughter and he’d cooked for himself for years. They’d had enough of all that. There was a plastic box in the freezer labelled in Medbh’s hand, ‘Carbonara: eat for comfort!’ This went in the microwave. Medbh was ‘our girl’, that was what they called her. Has our girl been in today? they said. What has our girl left us?

  ‘Pretend I’m not there,’ said his mother. ‘Of course I’m here and it’s marvellous. But don’t listen out for me. Have you any rules for me? Please tell me one or make one up so it’s not just me being officious and strange.’

  And Helena had embraced her, surprising her. ‘Teresa to consent to physical shows of affection from admiring, loving daughter-in-law.’

  His mother was smiling. It moved Paddy to see this.

  ‘Rule two,’ said Paddy, ‘Medbh, “our girl”, will come to clean and cook for you once a week and we will pay for that.’ They’d been over this before.

  ‘I don’t need a girl,’ said his mother.

  Helena said, ‘Teresa, I wanted you to have her twice a week, like us, so I’ve already compromised. Can you meet us here?’

  ‘But what will she do except twiddle her thumbs?’

  ‘No, Ma, that’s your job now,’ said Paddy.

  For Paddy’s two sisters, Teresa’s move was perfect. Whatever guilty worries they had about their mother—her possible loneliness, the need for help in emergencies—seemed neatly stored in the vicinity of their brother, her only son. Stephanie, the baby, with her small girls, no husband most of the time, and the right to kidnap Teresa whenever she needed to; Margaret, with the vague historical wound of antipathy towards them all, had a family and a life safely in Vancouver. What did Patrick have, the sisters wondered, except finally a settled and straightforward existence with a sane and grown-up person, in a nice apartment building? It had turned out that no one had really got on with Bridget.

  For Helena and Paddy too, the move made sense. Helena loved Teresa as he did, for the qualities of her spirit: patience, selflessness, and a quietly efficient satirical streak. Helena also took reassurance from strains in Teresa’s personality that for a son were perhaps more ambiguous: her independence and her vast privacy. She wouldn’t pop in. Perhaps the women’s hug had carried something of this too: as opposed to being the start of increased intimacy—his mother was not a great hugger—it was a special occasion, contract-sealing moment? Thank you for these rules. We will leave each other alone as much as possible.

  He looked into the theatrical night sky above his mother’s kitchen window. It was another windy night and in the foreground low dark clouds slid quickly over their building in the direction of the South Island, while behind them pale clouds were fixed in a stack, as if there were two skies. A rope might have been pulling the low clouds across a painted scene. The whole thing was backlit by a full moon. It was beautiful and intriguing, the setting for something, probably another round of ugly belting northerlies.

  When they worried about emergencies with their mother they meant nothing much. A couple of months ago she’d fallen. In the middle of the night she felt ill and she’d gone to the bathroom where she vomited. It was something she’d eaten. She’d woken up on the bathroom floor, cold, and realised she’d passed out from the vomiting. She guessed an hour or so had gone by. She put her hand to her head and felt blood. In falling she’d struck her head on the side of the shower box. The wound needed stitches. It was not the reason she’d moved next door but it was part of the background to the decision, and part of Paddy’s and Helena’s insistence that Medbh be involved too. Another set of eyes.

  Paddy had talked to Stephanie about this, who agreed. And maybe Steph would tread gently for a while, he said. How else do I tread? she said. His sister was hurt at once. Go easy perhaps, he told her. ‘Easy? I’m easy! I’m the easiest one.’ She was reddening in her face, already beginning to get teary. He only meant that with the girls she should be aware of not putting too much onto their mother. ‘But she loves the girls! They bring her joy!’ Yes, they were lovely and also young and tiring sometimes. He wasn’t suggesting a ban or anything, merely a space. Stephanie had turned away from him and he saw her neck was a massive blotch. ‘Are you taking her from me?’ she said.

  ‘Don’t be silly,’ he said.

  ‘Then why is she moving into your building?’

  ‘Because you live in a two-bedroom house full of bunks.’

  She turned back to him, eyes glistening, her anger instantly gone. She looked suddenly grateful, as though he’d solved a problem she’d been hounded by for a while. ‘Yes!’ she said. ‘Yes, where would we put her? In a cupboard?’

  He slid back into bed as carefully as he could but Helena sat up at once and hit her pillow a few times. Then she took a sip of water from her glass.

  ‘What’s that smell?’ she said.

  He got out of bed and washed his hands again. Now he was a cyclist, he would need to buy special jelly for getting oil and grease out of his skin. He wondered what Lant used. By the time Paddy came back, Helena was asleep again.

  *

  Lant had taken Paddy to the bike shop and made him buy the right bike. Pretty much it was his friend’s idea, though one Paddy had become curious about. Someone offers an idea about you, it’s interesting. ‘I feel you need to be fitter to face what you’re going to face,’ Lant told him.

  Lant had been biking for about a year, following his marriage break-up. Since then he’d had a series of girlfriends—short-lived, immensely gratifying, he said—and he credited this success to a regular regime of punishing road work around the Wellington hills. He was fit. Lant was also trying other new things, having joined a band. This vaguely annoyed Paddy. Anyway, Lant had converted his hopelessly square childhood under a piano-teacher mother into a surprising guest gig as a violinist with a part-time countryish bar band, which put him in pubs late at night. Paddy saw his friend now had a collection of plaid shirts, a pair of boots, and even a denim jacket. He’d yet to see the costume in toto because he hadn’t seen the band. Lant was coy about dates and times. Every so often, one part of the identity would get an outing—he’d be wearing a string tie, say. It was as if Lant was preparing Paddy, or even himself, for the transformation.

  ‘What am I going to face?’ said Paddy. Life with Helena had been marked by a deep and certain aliveness. They’d lived together for almost eighteen months. The apartment purchase was the clincher. He’d been no Casaubon. The post-Bridget years had not been about hoarding, frequently the opposite. Now he was happy, the real thing.

  ‘Patrick, we’re fifty now,’ said Lant. It was a number with a certain weight and he added more by touching Paddy’s arm as he said it. ‘Fifty years,’ he said.

  For his birthday in July, Helena and Paddy had gone to Rarotonga and been happy there, delighted, warmed, rained upon. ‘All right,’ he said.

  ‘How old were we when we first met?’ said Lant.

  ‘Twenty-four, five.’

  ‘Two men of fifty. Standing on the earth. Pinch me, I’m dreaming.’

  Paddy pinched him on the back of his hand. He flinched and pulled it away. ‘Good news, Jeremy,’ said Paddy, ‘you might be ancient and of the earth but you still have feelings in the extremities.’

&nb
sp; He rubbed his hand. ‘That may be more than you’ve got.’

  ‘Sorry,’ said Paddy, ‘but for me this last decade has seen major improvements. I feel in pretty good shape to face whatever’s around the corner. Barring a massive coronary or prostate cancer.’

  Lant looked at his friend with renewed interest. ‘What are your symptoms?’

  ‘None,’ he said. ‘I feel fine.’

  ‘Good,’ said Lant, disappointed.

  Fifty carried a certain threat but it was the truth that at forty Paddy had felt worse by far with everything in pieces and nothing settled. Married to the wrong person. In the wrong job, or in the wrong setting for that job. He’d walked out of the hospital. Jimmy Gorzo, Tony’s son, had been one of his last cases, a triumph. It was how he’d first met Tony. Paddy, together with the audiologist he’d worked with, had presented a paper on Jimmy at a conference in San Diego. That was Paddy’s big final act. He’d looked into the lights of the convention centre, seen the outline of three hundred heads listening to him—pretty nice, he thought. The hotel pool, he remembered, was in the shape of an ear.

  Then what? He’d come home and for the next six months worked first on the concierge desk of a city hotel before demoting himself to kitchen-hand in the hotel’s restaurant. Such a massive retooling could probably never be accounted for by tracing incremental motions. It was all or nothing.

  To Bridget he’d gone for nothing. She was a commercial property manager who’d watched her builder father die of asbestosis when she was sixteen. Of course they’d compared fathers. Anyway, she told Paddy he’d ‘menialised’ himself. Her sound conviction was that to fall below a certain salary band was to invite a health disaster.

  There was a uniform Paddy wore: grey jacket with the hotel insignia on its pocket, black trousers, white shirt. Lant thought it wasn’t quite the complete dissociative act. Hospitals, hotels, there was a connection of sorts. Institutions. The friends had suddenly grown interested again in each other after a period of not much contact. Lant now had a daughter too.

  Lant wasn’t to blame but Paddy had developed a fairly refined, if fluid, rationale for the havoc he caused, a part of which was the self-serving notion that we had several lives to lead not the single one we’d settled for. There was also the deep response to whim, conventionally thought of as light. Yet whim could enter any life and turn it in a new direction. It was a whip, spurring us on to unlikely achievements. To her ultimate credit, when he’d said something about all this to Bridget, she gagged on the spot, actually retching in front of him. She had her hand to her mouth.

  One might retrain to fight cancer or to fly a helicopter, drive an ambulance even, but what he’d done was all negative, she said. Turned himself off at the wall were her actual words.

  At the hotel Paddy volunteered to do nights, the room service orders. Soups at midnight, muffins to lovers at 3am. Creepy salesmen. It gave him more time to drift around the hotel, to doze and take part in hi-jinks. Bridget was properly terrorised. All his thoughts about her at this time were basically satirical. Cracking up but not going foetal, abandoning his profession but working quite solidly and responsibly, he was a ball of confusion to behold and he felt little humanity. Better for everyone that he was at the hotel, which was basically the home of satire, pranks anyway. He knew he was being a prick and a lunatic. He had to be very polite and obsequious there in a massive sublimation of the aggression he felt. (Lant.)

  Bridget: Shift workers are the worst placed of any among the employed. People working night shifts have more accidents, contract illnesses. Statistically et cetera.

  Paddy: Your fury at me is also a risk factor. Your blood pressure. (She was on medication.) The angry use themselves up faster than anyone.

  It’s you causing me to be angry!

  You were furious before this, when I was helping keep our economic unit safe. And you didn’t care for what I did before. (True.) You live in a state of agitation. I think you get something from it, being furious. Then you collapse. It’s a cycle. (Tendentious and cruel.)

  So you think I’m doing it on purpose?

  No. But nor am I.

  Nor are you working as a kitchen-hand on purpose you mean? That makes no sense.

  He no longer seemed devoted to sense, she was correct. However, it wasn’t all nasty invention. Here he was referring to the fact that after they were married, every six months or so, she took to her bed, inexplicably, struck down. Nothing to do with her blood pressure, which was the first thing checked. Initially, he thought it was a pretend illness, no, he thought it was very serious, then he was suspicious. Diagnosis-wise, there was nothing, but the suffering was real and he saw he had to swing into action. For three days, four days, longer, he nursed her. Meals on trays. They had to put the phone on silent ring because it gave her a fright. She asked him to examine rashes on her arms and her back, as if he were a doctor. He only worked among them, was looked down on by them. Real doctors had examined her and she applied cream to no effect. She had flaky skin around her nose. She had a shake in her hands, burning sensations in her feet. Once she told him it was as though she were lying on an oven tray. Night was worst because the oven door closed and she was in the dark. She was very scared. He was frantic to find out a cause when it recurred. Then after the fourth or fifth time, they adjusted domestically. In temperature and appetite, despite the fieriness, she was always normal. She had MRI scans that showed nothing. She was not mad though, which was what she feared. He knew she was fairly mad but that was different, to be mad in private. Mad at him, or along with him. Two psychiatrists had given her the all-clear. Some sort of chronic exhaustion perhaps? Rest. Yet rest made her over-tired.

  During these bouts she spoke with a tiny, dried-up voice, and she lifted her head off the pillow and pursed her lips for Paddy to apply lip-balm. It was this aspect that shocked him most deeply, the lips, the voice. Here evidently his professional sensitivities showed. Normally she spoke in flat, booming tones. She dealt with businessmen, she walked through cavernous spaces, empty office blocks she was trying to fill. She honked. Often she answered the phone carrying a calculator and announced numbers. There was not a trace of sales pitch in her voice. Perhaps this was connected with her success, the ability to remove hope, its ingratiating music, from her speech. To hear this unvarnished voice was to be persuaded of neutrality and the prospect of a good deal.

  As she lay in bed, she sounded frighteningly girlish, beseeching and fearful and lost.

  Just as quickly, she was better again. Her skin cleared up, the rashes were gone. She began again to carry her calculator. Her old voice came back. Shame clung to her for a short while. Contrition. Paddy felt this period was even worse than the bed-bound one. Her boldness, her strictness, her sweeping and unselfconscious power, even her paranoia, had been attractive to him once. He remembered how men like him thought they had to ask permission for everything. This proved to be a mighty misunderstanding. It was in retrospect a brief epoch of male grovelling, mourned surely by neither side. The first time they’d gone to bed, he’d tried to have sex without getting a full erection. Why? Was the penis a suspect tool? Well, he had one and she did not. These were the actual and not quaint terms of said epoch. A side-effect of feminism, late 70s early 80s local variety, was that nervous basically nice males, such as him, persuaded themselves their fears and insecurities were progressive. Quickly she put him right on all that. His courtesy was frankly problematic. If he were being a gentleman, gentlemen didn’t he understand were part of the problem. She wasn’t about to be broken as if she were a vase. She said, What is this? She was weighing it in her hand. What are we supposed to do with this? He responded at once, on command almost. From that moment on, sexually, their relationship had been satisfactory with an arrow heading up, indeed the only area in which humour could play a part. In bed, they both became childish, which sounded like the wrong word. When he held her, she talked about his one-bar heater. Her period was known by them as ‘Mr Full Stop’. Her f
avourite position was on top, from where in week two, she asked him whether he’d thought of names for her breasts. Two names. He hadn’t. Instantly he said, Maude and Claude. He licked his thumb and touched them in turn, saying the names. Hello you two, she said. Outside the bedroom, perhaps wisely, perhaps not, they never attained anything like this sort of tone.

  He sometimes thought Bridget was humourless, meaning she didn’t like his jokes, or the jokes he liked. She preferred Mr Bean to Preston Sturges. Everyone just shouted, she said. This was after Sullivan’s Travels. Periodically he brought things home—books, videos—which he wanted to put in her way. The Henry Higgins aspect she sniffed a mile off. Higgins of course was a professor of phonetics. They’d even watched the video of My Fair Lady together. The first film in which an actor sang live though a wireless mic. Rex Harrison’s cravat concealed it. Rex didn’t think he’d be able to lip-sync because every time he did the songs it was different. Bridget hated this sort of information from him. I feel like I’m at your work. She never understood his work. On this they were even. What she actually did away from the house remained a dull mystery to him.

  They were incompatible on a major scale, and this incompatibility turned out to be a kind of glue. From the outside they both saw the extent of the mismatch but they also sensed each other’s defiance of opinion. Here was their commonality: to prove others wrong. Yet that made it sound too small and sour. Attempting objectivity, he sometimes tried to see the tape afresh, and more positively. They’d had some decent and interesting and harmonious trips overseas. Sexual satisfaction or plain availability went a long long way. Maude and Claude. And busy working lives. Theirs was decidedly not that couple whose fighting escalated to such a frenzied point that the only action left was, depending on the genre, murder or love-making. They had a gift for each other and they knew enough not to give it too often.